Preview font before installing

Rene Verkaart6 July 2004 · 13:47

Hi guys,

Sometimes when I'm designing I want to preview a font just to see if I like it. I have a lot of stuff offline, but don't want to go the whole time online to preview it. I also don't want to install it in FontAgent and remove it after 2 seconds when I see it's not the font I was looking for.
Before I used FontGander to preview my fonts and that worked perfect for me. But now that we are on OSX I can't seem to find a (preferably) freeware program that allows me to see a font before I install it. That's too much of a hassle and could mess up my allready installed fonts.

Is there someone that knows a good program that meets my expectations?

Thanks,

Stephen Coles6 July 2004 · 14:03

If you double-click on a font file in OS X you will get a simple
preview in Font Book. That's about all the app's good for - but
it works for a quick sample.

Tiffany Wardle6 July 2004 · 14:11

You might also check out X Font Info at versiontracker.com

glutton6 July 2004 · 14:17

When I double-click a font it launches Font Reserve, dagnabbit.

Tiffany Wardle6 July 2004 · 14:22

Well, I use xfontinfo ... i find a suitcase ... get info ... change this and all others to open in xfontinfo ... voila!

victor6 July 2004 · 14:53

One of the things I liked about FontGander was that it allowed you to see *all* the characters (and also find out key combinations easily).

Will anything do that in OS X?

Tiffany Wardle6 July 2004 · 14:56

x font info is a blank page for you to type any text you want to see. but as for all chars and stuff, have you used the character palette?

as86 July 2004 · 15:30

What happened to Semplice Soft.?

http://www.semplicesoft.com/
Semplice Software
7925 6th St. NE
Spring Lake Park, MN 55432 USA

Rene Verkaart6 July 2004 · 23:35

I looked around a bit more and found 'Font Showcase'. I'm testing it right now and must say that I kinda like it. It workes much like FontGander. It will allow you to load an external folder which contains fonts. Or you can just load one single font.
It allows you to use your own text string to see the characters. This is good, because mostly I need the font for a specific logo or name. You can change this into any text you want.
If you want to see the whole character set, use the 'Character View' option, which surprisingly brings up an extra window. Here you can see all the glyph boxes with it's number and keyboard combination. This only works with installed font though. An external font will not be previewed. And that's just what I wanted.

All toghether it workes fine for now, but Ithink I'll find something better. I'll have a serious look at the other suggestions and let you know.

Thanks,

victor7 July 2004 · 10:29

Does the Character Palette in Panther include keystrokes? (It doesn't on Jaguar.

Victor

Jes�ús de Francisco7 July 2004 · 11:41

If you have a media management app like iView Media Pro you can just drag your font folders onto its icon and it will show you a customizable preview of every font in that folder. Same as it does with images.

Maybe iPhoto does this too?

Tiffany Wardle7 July 2004 · 15:19

No but you can drag and drop the glyphs into any osx application quite easily.

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