Application: NexusFont
Category: Utilities
Description: NexusFont is a simple but powerful font manager for Windows. You can organize your fonts in groups and sets, copy, install, deinstall and delete fonts easily—all from your portable device. While running, NexusFont even auto-activates your font sets without you having to install them on the guest system. This works with most applications, but not with GIMP, Scribus and some other Linux ports due to the way these handle fonts.
Download NexusFont 2.5.5.1420 Development Test 1 [839KB download / 2.1MB installed]
(MD5: 8a7d0c7069bd83a17a644ed80823680f)
Release Notes:
Development Test 1 (2011-01-27): Initial release
- Based on NexusFont, portable edition, v2.5.5.1420. This is an online installer which loads the NexusFont freeware directly from the author’s site.
- Should support correct PA Menu and standalone language switching for Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Br), Romanian, Russian, Simpchinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese.
- While running, should auto-activate your additional font sets in applications without manual install. For some applications, a fresh start is needed for them to "see" the new fonts. Beware if you have several thousands of fonts—it may make applications a little sluggish.
- When deinstalling fonts, a backup can be made. You’ll find it in the NexusFontPortable\App\NexusFont\userdata\backup folder if running, in NexusFontPortable\Data\NexusFont\userdata\backup otherwise.
- For safety reasons, automatic updates have been disabled as default.
- Some standard Windows fonts are "protected" by Windows File Protection (WFP) and cannot easily be changed. You’ll find a list in NexusFontPortable\App\NexusFont\protected.lst.
- The default (partly German) text sample can easily be changed: Just type in something new or select another default text sample using the down-arrow button next to the input field.
Known problems:
- NexusFont Portable will not run on Windows systems below XP. It should be fine on XP, Vista and Seven.
- While NexusFont is running, ALL fonts in your font sets will be made available to all (well-behaved) Windows applications. Having several thousand fonts in your library might make some applications a little sluggish—and the fonts menu almost not usable anymore … Some applications need to be restarted to make use of the additional fonts (they only read the font list upon starting).
- New language files downloaded from the author’s site will not automagically be selectable via the PA Menu, because Noh JungHoon uses a VERY odd internal numbering scheme. I’ll keep an eye on it and update the installer, if needed.
- The OpenType variants of the Linux Libertine and Biolinum fonts (.otf files) do not display correctly in the font preview, though they seem to work in applications. You can use the TrueType (.ttf) variants in the meantime, or just ignore the display problem. Maybe this problem also happens with other OpenType fonts. Let me know! (I’m in contact with the author about this.)
Things you might want to test:
- Language switching, from within the PA Menu as well as standalone
- changing drive letters while having your font groups/sets on the USB device
- checking for unwanted changes (registry, file system)
- check font auto-activation while NexusFont is running (the fonts in your SETS)
- Non-Admin behaviour on XP, Vista, Seven
Please let me know your findings, and please specify OS version, Service Pack and update status as well as OS and PA Menu languages in your answers. Thanks!
Please test this release thoroughly! I’d very much like this to become an official release soon. NexusFont really seems to have everything to make it "the" Windows Font Manager.
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Yesss, my favorite font app, now in PA.c format! I did a quick test and so far it seems to work as it should. Language of PA Menu is persistent, standalone it stays as it is set. Drive letter changing worked, but I did not test it thoroughly.
I will do some further testing when I really use it on different computers,
Thanks,
dj
My experience with NexusFont is this:
In the left hand pane you have three areas:
1. Installed - fonts installed in Windows
2. Folders (i.e. "Sample Group") - actually a link to a folder that contains fonts. You can rename this, and add other Folders, but you don't NEED to INSTALL these fonts.
3. Sets - these are groups of selected fonts from your Folders. These are not INSTALLED, either.
Any fonts in the "Folders" that have not been INSTALLED or added to a "Set" are not available for use. The "Folders" are your pool of possible fonts, so to speak.
Any fonts added to a "Set" are available to the well-behaved Windows applications. The "Sets" are your temporary fonts, then.
This way, you can preserve resources and choose which fonts you need to use at any particular time without having to install any more to Windows.
The only app I have that does not play nice with this is GIMP (unfortunately) - it has its own way of dealing with fonts!
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
Thanks for feedack so far, keep it rolling!
Solanus: Interesting observation, thanks! I’ll have to do some more testing with groups and sets, I think.
Updated description in first post. (Mainly: The auto-activated fonts are those in your SETS, not ALL of your fonts.)
Also contacted the author re some minor issues and official permission for PortableApps.com. I herewith also declare to agree to the minimum 6 month responsibility in case we all reach an official agreement.
Downloads so far (first day): 30
Did you get a reply, yet?
Once the issues are sorted out, you could post it as ready for official release, if you are willing to. I would really like to see it official, too.
I've been testing this DT1 version for some time now, and it works fine.
However:
"Things you might want to test:
* changing drive letters while having your font groups/sets on the USB device"
It doesn't "portabilize" the drive letter if you have a directory with "portable" fonts on your USB device - which means you have to have the programs recognise the directory with the portable fonts (supposedly the ones you really like to carry around with you) everytime the stick changes its drive letter on another PC. The drive letter of font directories is contained in the ini file of the application - it would be easier if that setting could be made to fit the drive changes typical for a portable application. That would mean tampering with the original application itself though, and I don't know if it ought to / could be done???
dirk
It's easier, since they are stored in the
\Data\NexusFont\userdata\library.xml, a simple FileWriteN in Launcher.ini to replace PAL:LastDrive with PAL:Drive should do the trick.That does not take care of fonts that are not located on the USB-drive, but that should be obvious to most users.
Also, MinOS could be set to XP in Launcher.ini, so the user is warned. edit: (that would require the PAL 2.1, though)
A note to sets and groups:
).
I did not use sets until lately, because I never understood, how they worked. It is a little bit different from what solanus stated (or from what I understood
The way they are "activated" is easy memorized, once you realize how it works - just highlight the group or set and these fonts should become available (and the others unavailable vice versa). So you could add a whole selection of fonts to a group and activate them all by highlighting the group, or devide them into sets to only use several of them.
Groups are an easy kind of Pool where you link the locations of your font files to. From there on, you could put them into sets for your needs. That enables you to just "activate" the specific fonts actually needed.
That are two ways to organize fonts. Groups can be orgnized in another way as sets are. I use groups to sort my fonts by type (handwriting, groteske, decorative etc.) and sets for various applications (sometimes just for one document, fonts for school etc.).
Thanks, depp.jones, I was noticing that LibreOffice seemed to add all the fonts in the first "group" (which had ALL my fonts in subfolders) and that actually caused LO to slow down a lot. However, in light of what you've said, it's obvious that it's only because that "group" was highlighted. I'm going to re-org, and put my most common fonts in the first "group", so that when I open NexusFont it loads them by default.(Although, it does remember the "group" that is selected when you close NexusFont).
Also, I've noted that most apps build their font lists at the time they load (like LibreOffice, for example). So, you need to select your "group" or "set" before you open your app; if you need to change to a different "group" or "set", you need to close and re-open your app so it finds the new fonts.
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
I've tried both the original portable version of the app (the zip file) and the paf (DevTest 1) here, and both of them work just fine when you change the drive letters.
Even though the library.xml contains drive letters, that gets updated and the drive letters adjusted every time you launch the app. It appears that Noh JungHoon has built this into the app.
I dunno - while I'm always glad to see a new paf app, I suspect that this app is fully portable even without being in paf format. If that's the case, the only advantage to putting it in paf is to make it play nice with the PA Platform.
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
Fine, I thought, I had overlooked that, contrary to my first post. I wasn't able to test that today, since both my active USB-Drives have different font sets and I didn't want to exchange them. My drive letters are somewhat determinate to facilitate sync and i didn't want to break that just for testing. I think I could do a test tomorrow, when I'm back at school. Somehow there seems to be a catch there with old_man's setup so I'll try to reproduce it...
I double-checked ... and it does change the drive letter.
What happened was that I had the program installed on two different USB sticks, both with PortableApps platform. Or rather installed it on one, and then - after running it and setting the portable fonts directory - copied the installed application including the fonts directory to the second stick (which has a different drive letter), BUT LEFT THE FIRST ONE CONNECTED. The copy on the second stick then went on to open the font directory on the first stick, without changing the drive letter.
I now found out that when I remove the first USB device, the app does change the drive letter correctly.
dirk
Hi Moonbase, are you still developing this? If not, do you mind if I take over? Did you get an answer from the developer for bundling this?