Similarly, the latest version of the Choosefont font selector is 0.3, which was released in January 2004.

The Font Manager project is at version 0.0.1 and currently useful only as a font viewer. In the last few years, developers have made several attempts to provide this functionality, but none of the projects has gotten very far. Designers need a convenient way to load the handful of fonts they actually need for a project, then unload the fonts when they no longer need them. Nobody would care to scroll through thousands of single-line entries in a combo box, even if a history of recently used fonts were available. Many designers have tens of thousands of fonts, and loading them all into the X Window System makes for unacceptably high overhead.

Now that designers tend to work on machines with more than 1GB RAM, dynamic font swapping is less of a problem than it was when a top-end computer had 32MB. If you’re working in (OOo), StarOffice Printer Administrator (spadmin) offers a partial solution to the problem. One of the few remaining gaps in basic desktop functionality in GNU/Linux is the dynamic loading and unloading of fonts, especially in groups.

Fonts for openoffice