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3. Activation and installation

making a font visible to other applications, per user, in place or by copying; scopes, conflicts, and restoring after a reboot.

Indexing a font tells fontina about it. Activating it tells the operating system, so that every other application can use it. fontina does this per user, without elevation, and without touching a system font directory. Two commands do it in two ways:

fontina activate TARGETS...

Registers the font file in place, where it already lives. Nothing is copied. Persistent for the user across logins unless --session, which lasts until logout or reboot. Undo with deactivate.

fontina install TARGETS...

Copies the file into the per-user font directory, which the operating system already watches. The copy is an ordinary file you can see and delete. Undo with uninstall.

Both take the usual targets: face ids, family:<name>, or indexed file paths (with path#1 for one face of a collection).

$ fontina activate family:Amiri
$ fontina activate 42 --session
$ fontina install 42
$ fontina activations
$ fontina deactivate family:Amiri

activations lists everything fontina has activated or installed, with its state (session, user or installed) and when. The same state is a filter on list (--active, --activation user) and a facet. The A flag in list marks an active face.

Which one to use

Activate when the font lives in a folder you keep (a project, a synced directory, a foundry download) and you want it to stay there. Install when you want the font to survive the folder going away, or when an application only sees fonts in the user font directory. On Linux both are symlinks or copies under $XDG_DATA_HOME/fonts and behave identically to fontconfig; the difference is only whether the original must stay put.

Conflicts

Two active fonts with the same PostScript name, or the same family and style, fight over which one an application gets. Before activating, fontina checks the targets against everything already active and everything in the operating system’s font directories. A clash stops the command with exit status 2 and prints what clashed.

$ fontina conflicts 42
$ fontina activate 42
1 conflict(s): Amiri Regular (Amiri-Regular) is already active from /usr/share/fonts/... Use `fontina activate --replace` to override.
$ fontina activate 42 --replace

--replace deactivates or uninstalls the conflicting faces first, but only the ones fontina manages. A font in a system directory is reported and left alone; that is the one case where the answer is “not with this tool”.

After a reboot

Persistent (user) activations and installs survive reboots because the operating system remembers them. Session activations do not, by design. The index records them, and fontina restore re-applies every recorded activation:

$ fontina restore

Run it from a login agent if you want session activations back automatically. It is idempotent and quick. A systemd user unit on Linux:

# ~/.config/systemd/user/fontina-restore.service
[Unit]
Description=Re-apply fontina font activations

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/fontina restore

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

$ systemctl --user enable --now fontina-restore.service

On macOS a LaunchAgent, on Windows a Run key or a scheduled task, does the same. Packaged agents are on the roadmap and will be off by default.

What each platform does

One trait, three implementations. The mechanism is always the operating system’s own per-user one, so removing fontina leaves everything reversible by hand.

Details and caveats per platform are in Platform notes.

Exit status

0 applied. 1 an error. 2 a conflict blocked the change and nothing was applied; add --replace or resolve it by hand.

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