ZFontManager 0.4.0

Import fonts without moving them, auto-activation for Affinity by Canva, and
activate a whole library in one keystroke.

Download for your platform below, or from https://zsync.eu/zfontmanager/

What's new

Import on your terms. Dropping fonts in now asks how you want them handled.
Add to library leaves the file exactly where it is — an external drive, a
project folder, wherever you keep it — and registers it from there. Copy to
system folder copies it into your library folder and clears the original away.
You can point that library folder anywhere you like under Settings.

Duplicates are noticed. Fonts already in your library are reported and
skipped instead of quietly being added twice.

Auto-activation for Affinity by Canva. Open a document and the fonts it
asks for switch themselves on, for as long as Affinity is running, then switch
back off when you quit. Nothing is installed permanently. It is off until you
turn it on, needs Affinity 3.2 or newer with Model Context Protocol enabled,
and only ever talks to the copy of Affinity on your own machine.

Activate a whole library at once. Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on macOS) selects every font
in view — the entire library, or just what your search and filters have narrowed
it to — and one right-click activates or deactivates the lot, with a single undo.
Also in the command palette as "Select all".

Filter by state. New sidebar sections for Activated, Activated until close,
Deactivated, Last imported and System fonts, each reachable from the command
palette.

Per-file actions when two fonts share a name. The conflict panel lists every
file involved, marks which copy is active, and lets you keep, remove or trash
each one separately. System fonts stay protected.

All nine languages are complete again. German, Spanish, French, Japanese,
Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese now cover
every string, with the plural forms each language actually requires.

Fixed

• Imported fonts were reported as inactive even when "auto-activate imports" was
  switched on and they had in fact been activated.
• On macOS, deactivating a font added with "Add to library" moved the original
  file out of its folder. Linked fonts are now linked and unlinked instead, and
  the original is never touched.
• Fonts added with "Add to library" were invisible to other applications on
  Linux and macOS, because they sat outside the directories those systems scan.
• Removing a font added with "Add to library" only unregistered it on Windows.
  On Linux and macOS it stayed available to other applications afterwards.
• The Affinity watcher scanned every running process every two seconds even when
  the feature was switched off, which was the default. It now does that only
  while the feature is on, and never starts at all on Linux.
• Opening Settings probed for Affinity even with the feature switched off.
• The source badge in the name-conflict panel showed "Managed" and "User" in
  English in every language.

A note on privacy

This release adds the first feature that opens a network connection, so it is
worth being precise about what that means.

Out of the box, nothing is sent anywhere. Nothing about your fonts, tags,
collections or notes is ever uploaded — no feature does that, on or off.

Affinity auto-activation is off by default. When you switch it on, ZFontManager
talks to the copy of Affinity running on your own computer, over loopback. That
conversation never leaves your machine: no DNS lookup, no packet on your
network, nothing for an ISP or anyone else to see. With the feature off, no
connection is attempted at all.

The README now carries a table listing every feature that can open a connection,
what it contacts, and whether anything leaves your machine. Anything added in
future goes in that table, off by default, and says so before you enable it.

Platform notes

Affinity auto-activation, and the existing Photoshop and Illustrator
integration, depend on software that has no Linux build. They appear only on
Windows and macOS, and nothing runs in the background on Linux looking for them.

If the AppImage will not start, install the .deb or .rpm instead — they are the
more reliable option on Linux. Two things commonly stop an AppImage: it needs
FUSE 2, which many current distributions no longer install by default, and it is
built on GitHub Actions against that runner's system libraries, so an older
distribution can be missing a version it expects. The packages have neither
problem.

This release was tested on Windows and Linux. The macOS builds are provided on a
best-effort basis and could not be exercised on real hardware before release —
the macOS-specific changes above were reviewed and type-checked but not run. If
something misbehaves on macOS, please open an issue and it will be looked at
promptly.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md is new in this release. If you are thinking of sending a pull
request, the two things worth knowing up front: everything has to work on Linux,
Windows and macOS, and any interface text has to be translated into all nine
languages. Both are explained there, with the reasoning.

Translations have their own shorter guide in docs/TRANSLATING.md — no code
required, and new languages are genuinely welcome.

Downloads

Windows ZFontManager_0.4.0_x64-setup.exe 3.6 MB
ZFontManager_0.4.0_x64_en-US.msi 5.0 MB

macOS ZFontManager_0.4.0_aarch64.dmg 7.7 MB (Apple Silicon)
ZFontManager_0.4.0_x64.dmg 8.0 MB (Intel)

Linux ZFontManager_0.4.0_amd64.AppImage 79.7 MB
ZFontManager_0.4.0_amd64.deb 6.0 MB
ZFontManager-0.4.0-1.x86_64.rpm 6.0 MB

SHA-256 checksums

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d4e6da510287d879d3b72f4f8d867adf58226f42bad368b88c150bd0f469a3d2 ZFontManager_0.4.0_x64_en-US.msi
d8df2905922c7c1783a088073beee38d0f3f30a4de9fd6cb70771d34cab4a961 ZFontManager_0.4.0_aarch64.dmg
e6b7cc0045dd56d67eee2bde371a119442101da1913a4aaac7f4f0e2f42fb118 ZFontManager_0.4.0_x64.dmg
02c4dc5491b20669c0432d3227d1fb62cfb015608b4e17fdd41bd5da98f19217 ZFontManager_0.4.0_amd64.AppImage
a88a2547793ba6d5bf1817bab6d91965a4dd6cacc6ad64c05ff8b895b88873d4 ZFontManager_0.4.0_amd64.deb
f32deed87c9e29f1704b53489a7ca697896a5bc7647d5a75b90a2ebaeac72d05 ZFontManager-0.4.0-1.x86_64.rpm

ZFontManager is free software under GPL-3.0.
https://github.com/TheHolyOneZ/ZFontManager