Yesterday I was searching for a few fonts after being fascinated by Tumblr typography. I came across many excellent fonts at font squirrel too. I wanted a few monospaced fonts for coding which includes Consolas, Droid Mono etc. I knew that Consolas can’t be distributed freely, so I installed it manually. Hunting for Droid, I too managed to download and install it manually.

Now the questions is why I did it all manually? this is because Synaptic just lists down the fonts in a dumb way. I can’t find out new fonts etc. Software Center solves the problem by giving fonts a prominent section. Still it is not upto the mark. Look at the image below

Find something weird? Even though font’s have their own place, their categorization is pretty bad. All the fonts are just listed down. That’s it.

The fonts can have categorization as Languages based. Another way would be to have it categorized as Monospaced, Sans, Serif fonts. We can also have a section for recommended fonts like Droid Sans.

The league of Movable Type has a list of Open Source fonts. I tried finding them and failed to do so. Can’t they be added manually? Availability of good fonts is an important aspect for designers to look at Ubuntu/Linux.

To be frank, I suck at making mockups. I can make it on the board pretty easily, but on computer I might end up wasting a significant amount of time to draw them. I think the UI designers at Software Center would be more experienced in Mockups. Even they would know how it should look, so that it is in accordance with Software Center UI guidelines.