## Fontmatrix Help

### Importing Fonts

Editor's Note: This doc is very much a work in progress as Fontmatrix evolves quickly. Each new release will get better and more complete docs.

The very first thing to do once you have Fontmatrix up and running is to import fonts that you want to manage with Fontmatrix. Use Import... option from File menu. Navigate until you find a directory containing your fonts, it will do a one time recursion through the directories. Once Fontmatrix has scanned the directories, they are imported into the left hand panel, however, the fonts are not activated by default. You can also import them via Drag and Drop.

Fontmatrix's window is divided in two major parts. On the left side there are Font listing and Preview tabs, while right hand side displays various info about each font, logically separated into Info, Sample Text, Glyphs and Tags tabs.

### Browsing The Font List

Navigating through the list is simplified by multiple levels of depth:
Fonts are sorted by the first letter of font typeface, full typeface name and the deepest level - the variant. On the last two levels fonts can be activated. Enabling typefaces is done by clicking on the checkbox in front of the name. You can selectively enable just singular variants at the lowest level.
The chosen font is automatically synchronized with the preview tab, framing the preview in the opposite direction. You can use Ctrl+Space to switch between the tabs on the top.
There are additional helpers below: 'View all' and 'View activated' which are pretty self explanatory.

When you finally get familiar with your collection of fonts you can use the search mechanism to narrow a selection of fonts. Searching is optionally case sensitive.
The main reason this program is called a font manager is its most powerful features are tagging fonts and organizing tags into collections for specific use. More info on that is to come later.

### Displaying Fonts

Fontmatrix offers you detailed information about your fonts. There are three types of information this font manager can provide:

- Font Info Tab - The font info shows the the internal text fields which display copyright information, number of glyphs, character map coverage, the Postscript name, which may be different to the displayed name in some applications and sometimes a version string. On occassion, there will be descriptive text and other information.
- Sample Text Tab By default this panel shows a sample of text and numbers from basic Latin-1, but you can add your own Unicode text samples in a number of languages and scripts to display the most important glyphs contained in a font. For example you can add a snippet of Arabic for use with fonts containing Arabic glyphs or add other non-Latin text for non-Latin fonts. Even most non-Latin fonts do have a basic range of Latin glyphs, even if the font is not used primarily for Latin texts.
  When you open an Open Type Font, below there will be an additional panel which displays the advanced Open Type features available within the font. With Absolute Mode Fontmatrix uses the basic Qt library to display the glyphs. When it renders onto the screen, Qt does not know that’s a glyph and does not optimize the rendering. It’s the reason why its display is not optimal at a small size. Quality and precision increases with larger sizes. With Freetype View is the well-known glyph rendering specialist. So we ask Freetype to _rasterize_ a path or otherwise create a bitmap (with antialiasing) and get the result in a simple bitmap display. Thus the display has good quality even at small size (try a 4/5 pt to get the actual idea of the Freetype team's skill! It’s amazing). But as it is a raster, quality will decrease when you zoom in.
- Glyph FIXME

## Managing The Collection

Understanding tags and tagsets concept is crucial at this point.
Tags are basicly user defined attributes that can be assigned to a font, while Tag Sets are a collections of those attributes.

Tag can be anything you want. Good example would be 'book' for typefaces suitable for book text layout and 'header' for chapter names of the same book.

Following the same example, ideal Tag Set would be 'Name of the book' which would be nothing more the union of typefaces/fonts 'book' and 'header' tags include. Bear in mind that any of tags can belong to more then one Tag Set at a time.

### Adding Tags

Select a font from font list on the left and switch to Tags tab on the left. Now you're able to write a Tag's name and add it pressing 'Add tag' button. Although tag appeared in tag list it's not assigned to any font by default. This must be done manually by clicking in check box in front of a tag. To add flexibility, Fontmatrix can assign multiple tags to one font.

### Managing Tag Sets

Bring Tag Set editor to the front. You can access it through menu Edit and selecting Tag Sets item.
FINISH LATER!