Announcements and release notes for fontina, a free software font manager.https://oddurs.github.io/enhttps://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-14-a-browser-you-can-work-in/https://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-14-a-browser-you-can-work-in/fontina 0.2.0 is out, ten days after 0.1.1: forty-two features, thirty-eight fixes and five performance changes. Most of it is the browser, a much larger set of questions you can ask of your library, and a long tail of hardening that came out of reviewing the last two milestones rather than out of bug reports. ## The browser `fontina ui` was a way of looking at the index. It is now a way of working on it. Mark many faces and act on them once. Take back the last thing that changed the index, whatever it was. Open a command palette over every command the program has, listed where you are rather than in a manual. Build a filter while watching the count move, using the same flags the command line takes — so the row at the bottom of the browser is the command that would have done the same thing, and copying it is how you script what you just did by hand. Three of the additions answer questions rather than run commands. **What else in this library is nearly this font** ranks the rest of your faces against the one you are looking at and shows the numbers behind the ranking. **Who can set this text** takes a paste and tells you which faces cover it. **What pairs with this** reads what a font says it is — its classification, not a guess from the name — and ranks on that. The layout follows the terminal now: as many panes as the window can carry and no more, one palette resolved against what the terminal can actually show, one box, one bar, one left edge. It is also measurably quicker. A pane builds the rows it draws rather than the rows it holds, the listing queries left the thread that draws, and there is a repaint budget in `scripts/bench` that fails the build if a keystroke stops being instant on ten thousand faces. The preview cache now says what it costs as well as what it saves. Two of the four browser milestones are finished and two are not: what it looks like is three quarters done, and the comparison work — pinning faces side by side — is still ahead. ## Better questions The index has held all of this since M0. The filters had not caught up. - `--lang` and a language facet, with a font's two different claims about a language kept apart rather than merged. - `--mono` and `--proportional`, and a spacing facet. On a developer's library this is the most useful single division there is, and it was read from every font and then thrown away. - `--script` repeats, so you can ask for two scripts at once, and `--script-min` asks how much of one a face actually covers. - A variable font is found at every weight it spans, not only at its default. A face whose weight axis runs 200 to 800 now answers a search for 400. ## Handing fonts over `collection export --bundle` produces a collection you can give to somebody else, fonts and all. `fontina tag sync` reads and writes the operating system's own file tags, in one direction at a time so it cannot quietly lose anyone's work. Every command that takes faces reads them from standard input too, so programs can pipe in. A specimen now says how many licensed fonts it is carrying, and is laid out so the type can be judged rather than merely displayed. ## Hardening Most of this was found by looking rather than by breaking. The WOFF2 decoder panicked on a file it was handed; it is contained now. An empty `cmap` no longer hides the rest of a font's report. Two processes creating the same index at the same instant no longer race. The watcher keeps up with what people actually do to a font directory. The rasteriser clipped a preview instead of smearing it, and stopped overflowing. A scan says which files it walked past and why, rather than silently ignoring them. The login agent that puts your activations back after a reboot touches only files fontina wrote, which is the sort of thing worth checking before it ships rather than after. ## Packaging Manifests for Homebrew, Scoop, winget and the AUR are in the repository. They are not published yet — that needs credentials only a person can create — but the release now also builds an arm64 `.deb` and an aarch64 `.rpm` alongside the x86_64 ones, and every package is installed for real with `apt` and `dnf` in a clean Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora before it goes out. [Download](../../download/) has the archives and how to check them: a SHA-256 for every file, a SLSA build provenance attestation that proves the archive came from the release workflow rather than somebody's laptop, and an SPDX bill of materials. ## Why 0.2.0 and not 0.1.2 Because forty-two features is a minor release. release-please was configured to move the patch number for a feature until 1.0, which is allowed before 1.0 and still wrong: somebody running 0.1.1 who saw 0.1.2 would have read it as bug fixes. That setting is off, here and from now on. Pre-1.0 still means what it said: command output, the JSON schemas and the health-check identifiers may change, and the [changelog](https://github.com/oddurs/fontina/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md) says when one does. [Releases](../../releases/) lists every version.Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-04-first-release/https://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-04-first-release/fontina 0.1.0 is tagged, the first release. It is the project formerly called unifont, renamed and relicensed under GPL-3.0-or-later in the same release, with the core library and the command line: indexing, search and facets, tags and collections, health checks, CSS and HTML specimens, per-user activation and installation on Linux, macOS and Windows, watched folders, shaped previews in the terminal, and the keyboard-first browser. Binaries for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64), macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Windows are on the [release page](https://github.com/oddurs/fontina/releases/tag/v0.1.0), each with a checksum and a build provenance attestation, plus `.deb` and `.rpm` packages and an SPDX bill of materials. The [download page](../../download/) says how to verify them. Pre-1.0: command output, schemas and check identifiers may still change, and the changelog will say when.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-04-manage-in-the-terminal/https://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-04-manage-in-the-terminal/Milestone M1 is on `main`: fontina now manages fonts, not just describes them. `activate` and `install` make a font visible to every application, per user, in place or by copying, on Linux, macOS and Windows, with conflict detection and `restore` for after a reboot. `watch` follows your source directories and keeps the index current. `preview` draws real, shaped glyphs in the terminal over kitty graphics, iTerm2 images, sixel or half-block text. `fontina ui` is a keyboard-first browser over all of it. Release archives will carry shell completions and man pages, and Linux gets `.deb` and `.rpm` packages. The manual has two new chapters, [Activation and installation](../../docs/activation/) and [Watching, previews and the browser](../../docs/terminal/), and the [command reference](../../docs/cli/) covers every new command.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-03-project-started/https://oddurs.github.io/fontina/news/2026-09-03-project-started/fontina 0.0.1 is tagged. It is not a release for users yet, but the foundation is in place: a Rust core that parses TTF, OTF, TTC, WOFF and WOFF2 through fontations, a SQLite index with full-text search, and a `fontina` command line with `scan`, `list`, `families`, `facets`, `info`, `dupes`, `css`, `check`, `covers`, `glyphs`, `license`, `specimen`, tags, collections and sources. Every command takes `--json` and the output types are published as JSON Schema. Continuous integration runs on GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows, checks the minimum supported Rust version, audits licenses and advisories, and diffs the schemas. Releases are built by a workflow with SLSA provenance and an SPDX bill of materials. Next is font activation on all three platforms, a `watch` command, terminal previews and a terminal interface. The roadmap page has the details.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT