Fontlinge

Assemble a font poster

Now you've sorted your fonts, removed dupes and viewed them in the WebGUI.
But you prefer having a printed font poster? No problem, we will also do that job ;-)

The fontlinge_montage script will arrange the preview images on a given page size and put a subline with the font's name under it.

Before I start to explain all the options, I'll explain you some parameters given after a "--option=":
p stands for the number of pixels (i. e. 20),
x stands for text.
Got that? Nice. I won't repeat it ;-)

Lets start with giving the width and height of the poster. This is done by specifying the --width=p and --height=p options.

If you have more fonts than those which fit onto one page - don't worry. fontlinge_montage will create as many pages as needed and save them as montage_####.png in the current directory (#### is a continuous number, so you can create up to 9999 pages).

To choose which fonts should appear on the poster, use --query='x', where x is a valid MySQL expression, for example "font_name LIKE '%' AND font_kategorie=3" will select all fonts from category 3 ("Broken"). Call fontlinge_montage --list-categories for a list of all categories.
To sort the fonts, use --order='x'. In most cases, x will be 'font_name', but you can also use another field of the "fonts" table in the database. The subline (with the font name) can also be customized.
First, get a list of valid font names by calling fontlinge_montage --list-fonts (the listed fonts are system fonts and have nothing to do with the fonts in your fontbase).
Choose one of them for use with --subline-font='x'
The subline fontsize is set by --subline-fontsize=p

If there is more than one column of fonts on your assembled pages, a vertical line between the columns will be drawn. Its width is given with the --strokewidth=p option. --strokewidth=0 will draw no line.

There are also some options to control the distance between preview images, sublines and the vertical line: --subline-distance=p, --y-gap=p,--x-gap=pand --x-rgap=p
You can see the effect of these options in the image below.

To quickly get a font poster, have a look at montage.sh.

Oh, if you want to print out the assembled pages, it may be a good idea to generate larger preview images. You remember the fontlinge_base --previews --forcepreviews --my_preview=x command?

Quicktip: