CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to ZFontManager are documented here. The format follows Keep a Changelog, and the project uses Semantic Versioning.

[0.8.0] — 2026-10-23

Fixed

• Affinity only got one style of a family. When a document used a font, the Affinity integration switched on that one file and nothing else, so a document set in Regular left the other eleven styles of a twelve-style family asleep and Affinity's font menu offered Regular alone. A matched font now wakes its whole family, the way Affinity lists it. Only styles that were off are switched on, so quitting Affinity no longer turns off styles you had activated yourself.

• A family looked active when only one of its styles was. The family switch was on as soon as any single style was active, which hid the problem above: there was no reason to click it. Families now have a third state. A partly active family shows a centred switch and "Partly active · 1 of 12 styles" in the detail panel, and one click activates the styles that are missing. It appears under both Activated and Deactivated in the sidebar.

• Affinity font names with spaces in the family were never matched by family. PostScript names drop the spaces ("SourceSerif4-Semibold"), and the fallback compared them against the spaced family name, so it found nothing. Names are now compared with spaces and hyphens ignored. A name that matches no family in the library is skipped instead of being guessed.

• Windows: a font Windows refused to load still counted as active. The result of loading the file was never checked, so a font could be registered, shown as active and still be missing from every other app. The file is now loaded first and only registered once that worked; if registering fails, it is unloaded again. Either way the toggle reports the error.

• Turning on part of a batch reported only the first error. Activating a family or a selection now says how many files failed ("3 of 12 fonts failed: ..."), and the library reloads its real state instead of flipping every switch back as if nothing had changed.

• macOS: activating a font that was already active failed with "no parked copy recorded", which would have broken activating the rest of a partly active family. It is now a no-op. A failed move back out of the parking folder also no longer forgets where the file was parked.

• Activate until close could turn off styles that were already on. It sent every file of the family, so closing the app deactivated styles you had switched on permanently. It now only sends the ones that were off.

Reported by zeusextremachine on Windows with Affinity by Canva, with an unusually thorough investigation. (#18)

Added

• An activation log. Every activation and deactivation is written to activation.log in the app data folder, with the result for each file and the names inside it (family, style, full and PostScript name). On Windows it also records how many fonts Windows loaded from the file and which registry entry was written. When a file claims the same name as one already activated, or shares its PostScript name with another file the library scan found (system fonts included), the log warns about it: apps then show only one of the two, which looks exactly like a missing style. Fonts Windows refuses to load at startup are logged too. The log stays under 1 MB.

Changed

• All nine languages gained the string for partly active families.
• pnpm test runs tests for the Affinity matching and family states, and the Rust side has tests for the log.

[0.7.2] — 2026-10-15

Fixed

• The Affinity connection status in Settings did not refresh while the panel was open. It showed whatever it found the moment you opened Settings, so during the startup grace period added in 0.7.1 it could sit on "Offline · Affinity link failed..." long after Affinity had connected. That wording is identical to one of the errors from #16, which made a working installation look like a failed one. The panel now follows the link live.

• Opening Settings could connect to Affinity during its startup. The status check ran a full connection of its own, outside the grace period that keeps the watcher away from Affinity while it starts — so opening Settings at the wrong moment could trigger the very crash 0.7.1 fixes. The watcher now publishes what it already knows, and the panel reads that instead of opening a connection. The Test connection button still probes on demand, as before.

  Found while testing 0.7.1 on Windows.

[0.7.1] — 2026-10-15

Fixed

• Affinity could be taken down at startup by the font activation integration. Affinity's MCP server starts accepting connections before the application has finished initialising, and ZFontManager connected to it the instant the process appeared — often while Affinity was still on "Initializing...". The request landing in that window could close Affinity with no error dialog, and left ZFontManager showing "preamble read failed: error decoding response body" or a failed link to localhost:6767/sse.

  ZFontManager now leaves Affinity alone for the first 20 seconds after it appears, and if the link still fails it retries with a widening gap (10s, 20s, 40s, up to two minutes) instead of reconnecting on every pass. A failed link is only reported after three consecutive attempts, so a slow start no longer raises an error you need to dismiss.

  One consequence worth knowing: fonts for a document open at launch are now activated a short time after Affinity starts rather than immediately.

  Reported by zeusextremachine on Windows 11 with Affinity 3.3.1. (#16)

• The Affinity link is far less demanding in general. Reviewing the above turned up three further problems in the same code:

  • Every poll reopened a session from scratch, retrying all three loopback spellings and up to three protocol versions each time. The working address and protocol are now remembered after the first success and tried first, so a healthy link is one connection rather than up to nine attempts. Both are forgotten again on failure, so a changed setup is still found.
  • Documents were re-queried every 10 seconds, each time with a complete handshake. That is now every 30 seconds.
  • A server that accepted the connection but did not report its own version string was treated as having refused every protocol version, and the link failed for no reason. Acceptance and the reported version are now tracked separately.

[0.7.0] — 2026-10-12

Added

• Copy a font's name with one click. Click the family name in the detail panel to copy it, or the PostScript name in the metadata list to copy that instead. Useful when an application has no font picker and expects you to type the name into a config file by hand. (#14)

• System tray. ZFontManager can now live in the tray. Three new settings under System:

  • Close to tray — the close button hides the window instead of quitting.
  • Start with system — launch at sign-in.
  • Start minimised — start in the tray without opening the window.

  All three are off by default, so nothing changes unless you turn them on.

  On Windows, left-click the tray icon to bring the window back and right-click for the menu. On macOS and Linux the menu opens on click, following each platform's convention — Linux desktops do not deliver tray click events to the application at all, so the menu is the way back. If the tray cannot be created, Close to tray stays inactive rather than leaving you with no way to reach the window. (#15)

Changed

• Tauri updated from 2.11.5 to 2.12.3, which the autostart integration requires. This also moves the underlying webview layer (wry) from 0.55 to 0.57.

[0.6.1] — 2026-09-22

Added

• Show only your own fonts. A new Show filter at the top of the filter menu switches between all fonts, system fonts, and the fonts you installed yourself. On a machine with several hundred system faces, finding the ones you added by hand no longer means scrolling past everything the OS shipped. It composes with the other filters, so you can narrow to your own fonts and then filter those by format, feature or character.

  Requested by a user who found their own fonts hard to pick out of the list.

0.6.0 — 2026-09-21

Everything here comes from one report by a tester running Fedora on a 1366x768 ThinkPad.

Added

• Interface scale. ZFontManager now measures the usable area of your screen at startup and picks a scale that fits the whole interface into it, so a small or low-resolution display shows the entire layout instead of a cropped one. Settings → Appearance → Interface scale overrides it: Auto, or a fixed 80–125% if you would rather decide, which also serves anyone on a large display who simply wants the interface bigger.
• Reduce transparency. A new Appearance setting that replaces the frosted glass with solid panels. It is easier to read, it is the accessible choice, and it removes the most expensive thing the app draws — which makes a real difference on older integrated graphics.
• Filter by file format. OpenType, TrueType, WOFF and WOFF2, in the filter menu alongside classification and language support.
• Filter by typographic feature. Swashes, stylistic alternates, discretionary ligatures, small caps, oldstyle figures and fractions. The feature list is now read while the library is indexed rather than only when a font is selected, so it can be filtered on. If you are hunting for faces with alternate letterforms, this is the fastest way to find them.
• Find fonts containing a specific character. Type any character into the filter menu and the library narrows to the fonts whose character map covers it. The search reads every font file, so it runs on demand rather than continuously, and it reports the codepoint it resolved your character to.
• Glyph count. Shown in the inspector, and available as a sort order.
• Collapsible sidebar sections. Browse, Collections and Tags each fold away, and stay folded between launches.
• Sort by glyph count, next to name, styles and size.

Fixed

• The window could open taller than the screen. The default size is right for the displays the app was designed against, but nothing checked whether it fitted. On a 1366x768 screen roughly a hundred pixels of the app sat below the bottom edge once the desktop panel was counted, which among other things hid the inspector's Tags section. The window is now measured against the monitor's usable area — panels, docks and taskbars excluded — and clamped and centred to fit. The configured default is unchanged, so nothing moves on a display that was already big enough.
• The context menu could not be scrolled. It had no height limit, so with enough tags the "Tag all" menu grew past the screen and lost its top. It now scrolls, and can no longer be positioned off the top or left edge.
• Panels turned unreadable when the compositor could not blur. Every overlay — the context menu, Compare, Settings, the selection bar — was a ten-percent-white surface that relied entirely on a backdrop blur to become legible. Where that blur silently does nothing, the panel was a haze. The new Reduce transparency setting makes them solid.
• No resize handles. ZFontManager draws its own title bar, and drawing your own means the window has no resize border unless you provide one. There was none, so the edges were a one-pixel guessing game. All four edges and corners are now grabbable, with the right cursor on each. This affected Windows and macOS too.
• The online font browser ignored the preview size slider, rendering every preview at a fixed size while the rest of the library followed the control.

Notes

• The tiny flickering squares reported on Intel HD 4000 with the crocus driver are not drawn by the app and were not reproducible away from that hardware. Reduce transparency removes the most likely trigger; if you see them, please try it and say whether it helps.

0.5.1 — 2026-09-19

Fixed

• The sidebar now scrolls. It had no scroll region at all, so once Browse, Collections and Tags together grew taller than the window, everything past the bottom edge was silently cut off — the Tags section first, then Trash, About and Shortcuts. 0.4.0 made this easy to hit by adding four rows to Browse. Browse, Collections and Tags now scroll; Trash, About and Shortcuts stay pinned at the bottom. Affected every platform.
• The onboarding tour scrolls its target into view before drawing the spotlight, so a step can no longer point at something below the window edge.

[0.5.0] — 2026-09-17

Added

• Online font browser. Search nearly two thousand open-licence families — the whole Google Fonts catalogue — and add any of them to the library with one click, from a new Online section in the sidebar. Filter by category, licence and variable-only. Each family shows its designer, licence, a link to the full licence text and its Reserved Font Name before you download; the licence text is stored alongside the font. Downloaded families are tagged Online automatically and marked In library in the browser afterwards.

  This is the first feature that contacts a real server, so the rules are strict and enforced in one place. Off by default. Switching it on sends nothing — a request goes out only when you open the section and search or download; there is no background refresh and no probe on startup. The catalogue is fetched once from api.fontsource.org and cached for seven days; search runs locally against that cache, debounced, so the provider sees one request a week rather than one per keystroke. Font files and licences come from the google/fonts repository via raw.githubusercontent.com — the canonical source, and the only one that serves complete fonts rather than per-script web subsets. Both hosts are named under the toggle. Every request passes through a single client that refuses if the setting is off, rejects any host not on that two-entry list, follows no redirects, and identifies itself as ZFontManager.

  The licence shown is read from the repository directory the files are actually fetched from, so it is by construction the licence that ships beside the font; the catalogue's licence field only decides which directory to try first.

  Opening a family shows a live preview of your current sample text in that font. One face — the Regular — is fetched for the preview through the same gated client, and if you then add the family the download reuses that file rather than fetching it again. Closing the family without adding it removes the preview file.

  Bunny Fonts and Fontsource's own CDN were evaluated and rejected as download sources: both serve only WOFF/WOFF2 or per-script subsets, which Windows cannot install and which would put a dozen partial copies of each style in the OS. Fontshare was rejected because the ITF Free Font Licence forbids redistribution.

• System fonts now say why they can't be turned off. On Windows and macOS the operating system owns its own fonts, and until now a system font showed a dimmed activation toggle that looked switched on but did nothing. It now shows a small lock badge reading OS, with the full explanation on hover: managed by the operating system, can't be turned off. On Linux, where fontconfig can exclude any font, the toggle is unchanged.

• Hide them entirely. The filter menu gains Hide fonts the OS won't let you turn off, so the library can show only what you can actually act on. It counts toward the filter badge and clears with the other filters.

Changed

• reqwest now carries a TLS backend (rustls, using the OS trust store). It was built without one, which was fine for the Affinity integration's loopback HTTP but would have failed on any https:// request.

[0.4.0] — 2026-09-16

Added

• Import modes. Dropping fonts in now offers Add to library (the file stays where it is and is registered from there) or Copy to system folder (copied into the library folder, original removed). On Linux and macOS a linked font is linked into the font folder so the rest of the system can see it — the original is never moved or deleted.
• Custom library folder under Settings, for deciding where copied imports are stored.
• Auto-activate for Affinity by Canva (Windows and macOS). While Affinity runs, fonts its open documents ask for are switched on, and switched back off when it quits. Needs Affinity 3.2+ with Model Context Protocol enabled. Off by default. Talks only to localhost:6767 — nothing leaves the machine.
• Auto-activate imported fonts, an opt-in Settings toggle for batches under 64 fonts.
• Sidebar filters for Activated, Activated until close, Deactivated, Last imported and System fonts, each reachable from the command palette.
• Duplicate detection on import: fonts already in the library are reported and skipped instead of being added twice.
• Per-file actions in the name-conflict panel.
• Select every font in view with Ctrl/⌘ + A, or Select all in the command palette, so a whole library — or whatever the current filters and search have narrowed it to — can be activated or deactivated in one action, with undo.

Fixed

• Imported fonts were reported to the interface as inactive even when auto-activate imports was on and they had in fact been activated, so the library showed the wrong state until the next rescan.
• The Affinity watcher enumerated 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 enabled, and never starts at all on Linux, where Affinity does not exist.
• Deactivating a font that had been added with Add to library moved the original file out of its folder on macOS. Linked fonts are now linked and unlinked instead, leaving the original untouched.
• 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 the font stayed available to other applications after it had been removed from the library.
• Opening Settings probed for Affinity even when Affinity auto-activation was switched off. Nothing is contacted now unless the feature is on, and the panel says Disabled instead of reporting it as offline.
• The source badge in the name-conflict panel showed Managed and User in English in every language.

Changed

• The Privacy section of the README now lists, in a table, every feature that can open a connection, what it contacts and whether anything leaves your machine. Today that is one row, it is off by default, and it is loopback.
• CONTRIBUTING.md now sets out what a contribution has to satisfy: it must work on Linux, Windows and macOS; a genuinely platform-bound feature has to be declared, gated, hidden on platforms it cannot serve, and written up in the README; and any new interface text has to land in all nine languages with the plural forms each one requires.
• README documents the new import modes, the Affinity integration, the state filters in the sidebar and the name-conflict panel, and the Privacy section now states the local-loopback exception instead of claiming no network activity at all.
• All eight translations are complete again: German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese each cover every string, with the plural forms their language requires.

0.3.0 — 2026-09-11

Added

• Apply a font in Photoshop or Illustrator (Windows and macOS). Right-click a family → Apply in Photoshop… / Apply in Illustrator…, or use the command palette with a family selected. ZFontManager talks to the running app (COM on Windows, AppleScript on macOS) and switches every selected text layer or text frame to the font; with nothing selected it adds a new text layer using the family name as sample text. A sleeping font is woken "until close" first, so auditioning never installs anything permanently. Every outcome is reported in a toast (applied with layer count, layer created, app not running, no open document, app hasn't refreshed its font list yet). Not yet verified against a real Photoshop/Illustrator — the app-side plumbing and scripts are tested up to the Adobe boundary only. Feedback welcome.
• Adding or removing a watched folder now indexes the library immediately, shows the progress inline in Settings, and reports what changed ("3 new fonts found", "4 fonts removed", or that no font files were found).
• Linux bundles (AppImage, .deb, .rpm) are now built by the GitHub Actions workflow alongside the Windows and macOS installers, and prepare-release.mjs refreshes the website download page and checksums.

Fixed

• Watched folders on Windows. Fonts in a folder added in Settings were shown as active, could not be deactivated ("font not found in per-user registry"), and every card said "This format can't be previewed yet".
  • Activation is now driven by what Windows itself lists in the font registry (read through the Win32 API instead of scraping reg.exe output). Fonts from a watched folder start inactive; switching one on registers it for your user account right where it is — external drives included — and switching it off unregisters it, without errors when there was nothing to unregister. Original registry names are remembered so a round trip leaves the registry exactly as it was.
  • Fonts registered from outside the per-user font folder are loaded again at app start so they are available to other apps immediately.
  • Bulk activation keeps going past a failing file and always persists what was applied.
• Previews for fonts outside the standard folders. Watched folders (and on Linux /usr/local/share/fonts) were never allowed through the preview asset scope, so their fonts could not render. Every scanned folder is now allowed at startup and whenever the folder list changes.
• Constant GPU load. A perpetual background-gradient animation kept the compositor busy on every frame and forced the blurred sidebar and detail panel to re-blur continuously — up to ~50 % GPU on large displays and integrated GPUs. The gradient is now static; idle GPU use drops to zero.
• The in-app "Reduce motion" setting now also disables CSS animations (skeleton shimmer, toast flashes), not only the interface springs.
• macOS: a deactivated (parked) font lost its preview, glyph map and OpenType feature list because those were read from the original path.
• Registry entries ZFontManager writes on Windows now use the names Windows itself would use: (OpenType) for CFF files, every face named for collections, and a numbered suffix when a name is already taken.

Changed

• All nine languages gained the strings for the features above.

[0.2.0] and earlier

Earlier releases predate this changelog. Their installers remain available on the download page.