Font Loader plugin for Archi

[Phil Beauvoir]

Hi all,

JB has developed a new plug-in, the Font Loader for Archi.

This plug-in allows you to make some fonts available to Archi without having to install them in your OS. This is especially useful when working on some corporate workstations.

The plug-in comes in two versions:

• The bare plug-in which will create a fonts folder in your Archi4 user folder. Put some fonts in this folder and restart Archi. The fonts will be made available to Archi.
  
• The plug-in with pre-loaded fonts (Roboto, RobotoConsended, FontAwesome Free, Numberpile). This version also allows you to add your own fonts in the fonts folder.

More information here:

https://github.com/archi-contribs/fontloader-plugin

Downloads here:

https://github.com/archi-contribs/fontloader-plugin/releases

Thanks for that, JB!

Edit - read below. This plug-in is now integrated into Archi itself

[rchevallier]

Seems very nice. Unfortunately, it is not supported for other OS than Windows. Thanks still for the good work JB!

[Phil Beauvoir]

It works on Mac, too. And, as JB, says, this plug-in supports the use case where you cannot install a font on the system because of local rights issues. Linux users can install fonts into the system.

See https://github.com/archi-contribs/fontloader-plugin/issues/1

[Phil Beauvoir]

An update on this.

We've found out that font loading works better if it is integrated into Archi itself, rather than as a plug-in. For technical reasons it ensures that the fonts get loaded at the correct point when starting Archi. This also means that it now works for Linux.

In Archi 4.7 beta 4 you can copy fonts into the "fonts" folder in Archi's user data folder (this location can be changed in Preferences) or create a "fonts" folder in Archi's installation folder. If this folder is not present, you can create it.

[Phil Beauvoir]

Another update on this.

For Archi 4.7 beta 6 we've removed the preference for a user fonts directory. It all worked fine on Mac but, sadly, caused some issues on Windows and Linux (see https://github.com/archimatetool/archi/issues/628#issuecomment-636464340)

Phil