Renaming Fonts in Ubuntu
I’m a total font addict, and while I have them fairly well-organized (folders by category, with a spreadsheet to track licensing), it drives me bonkers that the actual font files are almost never named with the actual font name. Since I am too damn lazy to rename hundreds of fonts by hand, I poked around online for a solution.
There are plenty of free font renaming programs out there – there’s even a domain, fontrenamer.com, that catalogs some of the better ones. They’re all Windows software, of course, but I’ve had some decent luck with Wine lately, so I crossed my fingers and tried installing one.
Well, I’ll be damned. It worked.
Free Font Renamer from Stypokin Software installed for me without a hitch (Ubuntu Karmic Koala, Wine 1.0.1). The software doesn’t run completely smoothly – there’s an access violation error at boot, and the post-renaming message abotu which fonts weren’t renamed goes off the top and bottom edge of the screen. (I’ve found that I have to kill the process to close the program, but this would probably be remedied by renaming less than 380 fonts at a shot, too.)
The program does what it’s meant to do, and does it well – font files are renamed to their actual font names, and duplicates are marked (copy 1, copy 2, etc.). Double spaces and special characters are automatically removed, there are options for removing spaces, all-caps, and all-lowercase options, and it’s light enough that the usual Wine lag isn’t noticeable.
i really love it when something works.
Dani made this mess on January 1st, 2010 and filed it under Fonts
Thanks for the tip! Just what I was looking for. This program worked fine for me under Lucid Lynx, with the latest Wine. I had similar problems (had to terminate it from processes, got the access violation at startup, long message about fonts that weren’t renamed), but it ripped through thousands of fonts in seconds! All appear to be renamed quite nicely.
Glad we could help!