# The best Font Viewer / Font Browser



## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Hey everybody,

I'm posting this in Digital Photography & Imaging because I use my font browser mostly for Photoshopping, maybe I'm better off in another forum but I'd like to hear your opinions first.
OK here's the deal: many programs floating around (free or not) that allow you to view and thus get an impression of the various font files you have on your system.
However, I have been unable to find a good one and trust me I've been googling and asking around like you wouldn't believe 

In my point of view, for people who are active in graphics and digital imaging a decent font browser is an absolute must is it not?
I've tried many, many programs to do this but found them all lacking at least some things that I wanted them to do... 

A checklist is in order:

1. It should allow you to browse other directories than just the WIN/FONTS/, obviously you haven't got all your fonts installed.

2. It should be able to view all font types, like TTF, TYPE1 (!!!), OTF and so on.

3. It must be able to show the WHOLE character map, including ALL special characters that are in the font file.

4. It is oh so handy to find the corresponding ALT+nnnn code and hexadecimal code for any character in that map. It should also have a copy option.

I'd like to hear if you have had any good experiences with a particular program that I could try.
As a matter of fact, all input is more than welcome 

Cheers,

/NL


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## CouchMaster (May 26, 2003)

'The Font Thing' - free at download.com


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

That one is only for TTF fonts... Many people, like myself, use OTF and TYPE1 fonts these days. Those are not supported by The Font Thing v0.8 (however, the version indicates that somebody's still working on it?)
Thanks for the reply anyway 

Cheers

/NL


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## sekirt (Mar 28, 2003)

We're bound to duplicate your efforts without a list of what you already rejected.

How about this one?


> can handle now PostScript OpenType (*.otf) fonts
> Show the list of installed fonts.
> Show the list of not installed fonts in a folder.
> Delete installed fonts.
> ...


AMP Font Viewer 3.61
http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php

sekirt


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## hubcap (Jul 24, 2005)

I think Irfanview will read several font types. It's also a very cool picture viewer/convertor. www.irfanview.com


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

FontPage does most of what you ask (though by launching the Character Map for the font for copying, etc.).

http://www.bluefive.pair.com


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

sekirt said:


> We're bound to duplicate your efforts without a list of what you already rejected.


 You're right, I think I listed the ones most recently tried plus some of my findings may be helpfull to other readers:


```
AMP                           -  Not bad at first sight, but no Type1 support

FontHit Font Tools 0.2.5      -  Requires .NET framework, crap.

Font Explorer 2.7             -  Nasty installer goes online all the time, rubbish display of characters, 
                                 no Type1 support.

Typograf 4.8f                 -  Only text lines, no character map

X-Fonter v5.3                 -  Seems to serve, but copy/pasting of characters is strange: character 
                                 not displayed properly.

Font X-plorer v1.22           -  seems to serve but is not great, need to open charactermap separately 
                                 and character map is limited to ASCII.

FontLister 3.4.9              -  Nice try, because no install needed. Program is buggy and does not feature 
                                 proper character map.

Advanced Font Viewer          -  Buggy, get thrown back to desktop once in a while.

Peters Font-Viewer 1.2        -  Nice because no install needed. Very limited though: only installed fonts 
                                 with sample text.

akFontViewer 3.2.0            -  Very limited: Only installed fonts and lacks complete character map.

Advance font viewer           -  No character map.

Fontonizer                    -  No OTF not Type1 support.

Free&Easy Font Viewer 1.2     -  Already seen this under different name.

Purple Parrot Font Viewer 1.3 -  Are you kidding me?

FontPage                      -  No OTF nor Type1 support.
```
Some graphics browsers do read font files, like ACDSee and Irfanview and so on, but those are very limited: a full character map is essential as well as being able to copy directly from it (or at least have the character number displayed). *IF* they support all font types, then they lack other features.
Generally, a specific font browser will be necessary.
Thank you all for the input so far... though it does seem to be difficult to find a good and complete program for this purpose.

Cheers

/NL


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## sekirt (Mar 28, 2003)

Sorry I can't take more than a brief look. Here is a link with some not on your list.

Printer's Apprentice 7.57 looks good here:
http://www.jump-to.com/shareware/grafont1.html

sekirt


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Thanks for your attempts Sekirt, I will keep on looking...
I was hoping on a revelation by somebody but I suppose I just need to keep on digging 

Cheers,

/NL


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## sekirt (Mar 28, 2003)

You may just have to pick the 2 best and alternate between them.  

sekirt


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Somebody recommended FontExpert 2005 7.0 and it really is great.
The auto hide function is great. All font support, maps available, various copy commands. Have I found true love?
It $49,00 though... that's kinda steep.

Cheers

/NL


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## sekirt (Mar 28, 2003)

That last link I provided has FontExpert 2004 6.0 listed at $35? If that will work and is still available....

sekirt


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Yeah I've seen the older versions... they're just as good I guess.
However v7.0 seems to be a bit "smoother", esspecially the auto hide function of the different windows that you need... very nice indeed 


/NL


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## ampsoft (Aug 29, 2005)

Hi guys,

I just found this thread via Google and maybe you want to know that I released a few days ago a new version of the AMP Font Viewer mentioned above that (finally) has support for Type 1 fonts (Windows 2000 or XP required). You can find the new version in the link posted in a previous comment.

I'm open to comments and/or bug reports  .

Regards.


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## slipe (Jun 27, 2000)

ampsoft said:


> Hi guys,
> 
> I just found this thread via Google and maybe you want to know that I released a few days ago a new version of the AMP Font Viewer mentioned above that (finally) has support for Type 1 fonts (Windows 2000 or XP required). You can find the new version in the link posted in a previous comment.
> 
> ...


Thanks for coming on the board with information about your program.

All of the download sites seem to have version 8 of Font Thing. This page seems to be the home page and lists version 8 as the latest from 1999. http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

Where do we get the new version?


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## ampsoft (Aug 29, 2005)

Slipe, it seems that you looked at the wrong program . My program is AMP Font Viewer, not The Font Thing.

You can download the last version (3.70) from the program home page:

http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php

(I didn't put the link in my first post since the forum doesn't allow post URL's to brand new members.)

Sorry if this isn't the update you have been waiting for...

Regards.


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## slipe (Jun 27, 2000)

ampsoft said:


> Slipe, it seems that you looked at the wrong program . My program is AMP Font Viewer, not The Font Thing.
> 
> You can download the last version (3.70) from the program home page:
> 
> ...


Sorry about that  no disrespect intended. I just need to improve my reading skills.

It looks like exactly what I need. Ive been using a simple viewer but my daughter gave me over a thousand fonts and I certainly dont want them all in the fonts folder. The ability to temporarily activate fonts until you close the program is a great feature.

I could probably get by with a dozen fonts. But she helps me edit a newsletter and InDesign is always telling me it is missing fonts when she sends me something. It will be nice to just load the missing fonts and have them dumped when I close InDesign.

Thanks again for coming on the board to tell us about your program.


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Nice update of your program, I tried it as well and liked it 
I have a suggestion for a future update though: your AMP browser only shows part of the whole charactermap, I want to see them all Many font libraries use more than just the regular characters. More so, it's hard to figure out what character is what letter (or, even better what ALT-xxxx code) e.g. in an ornaments or dingbats font file, but copy/paste works ok.
Thanx for posting, cheers

/NL


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## ampsoft (Aug 29, 2005)

(Sorry for the delay in the response, for some reason I didn't receive the reply notification email)

I received that suggestion from others user too, but for displaying the full character map Unicode is needed. I have planned add Unicode support to Font Viewer in version 4.0 (which release date is a mistery even to me).

Regards.


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## Lurker2k3 (Oct 8, 2005)

NightLord,
Have you tried "Font Navigator" version 5?
It seems to meet your requirements? (I am not sure about Unicode)

Corel has a trial version of the Draw12 suite, which includes it.

Download trial of CorelDraw12;
at WorldWideWeb dot Corel dot Com 
/akdlm/6763/downloads/trials/GraphicsSuite12/CorelDRAWGraphicsSuite12.exe

Assuming you want to only try "Font Navigator"; Simply unpack the CorelDRAWGraphicsSuite12.exe to a temporary folder then unpack a few of the necessary font navigator files from the Data1.cab file. These few files are: 

dunzip32.dll6 
Fn3API.dll6 
Fn3Res.dll6 
FontNav.cnt 
FontNav.exe6 
FontNav.hlp 
readme.hlp 

Those seven files are all you need! Some of the files may have a 6 at the end of the file extension. Just rename these few files by taking the 6 off the end of the extension. Put these extracted files into a folder of your choice, make a shortcut to the FontNav.exe and you are done. Once the exe is run the first time it makes a Cache, Data, and Groups folders. The whole thing is only 3.29MB, you can compress these and move it to any machine youd like without the huge demo installer or having to install anything else you do not wish to try.

Of course if you like it, then there is the problem of the price since it seems to only come with Corel products. Though as far as I can tell, there seems to be no limit on the trial of "Font Navigator". Whether this was Corel's intention; I do not know.

Personally since I use the Corel Suite, I could not live with out this program. It automatically installs fonts used by Corel documents upon opening. (Bitstream used to have a SDK for the product that they distributed for free, but I don't seem to be able to find that on the net. If anyone has an old copy of the free SDK, please let me know.) It is not as intuitive as I would like but on the other hand it is very feature rich. A carefull reading of the helpfile is needed.

NightLord, I would be quite interested in your evaluation of the product since you have been looking at so many programs lately. Please give a review.

Thanks!


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## NightLord (Sep 29, 2004)

Hi Lurker,

Thanks for your reply, I have been looking at the Font Navigator.
It looks quite OK and the small size is a definite plus, however I find the browsing strange: you need to built libraries by type of font, and those libraries can be browsed but only by filename... Opening the font in the sample window shows what the font actually looks like. 
It may be just me but I find it much quicker to just have an overview of the font names displayed in their particular style. This allows you to scan directories much, much quicker for the thing you need. Besides, I'm missing a window with the character map... You need to open the properties dialog for a view on the full character map... I guess I could live with that but then you need to know what font you're interested in to begin with. It happens that I'm just looking for one specific character (like a nice "&" or something, dingbats and so on).
A mighty big plus is that the character map can be viewed in various sizes and that the ALT+xxxx code is displayed for characters in the extended parts of the map. This character map though, is displayed IN the properties dialog box, it's therefore rather small of size.

The best one I've seen so far is FontExpert 2005 7.0 for sure, however the new version of AMP (which is free) is a good one as well.

Cheers

/NL


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## Lurker2k3 (Oct 8, 2005)

NightLord said:


> Hi Lurker,
> 
> ... I find the browsing strange: you need to built libraries by type of font, and those libraries can be browsed but only by filename... Opening the font in the sample window shows what the font actually looks like.
> /NL


Thanks for the review.

I always have the sample window open. So thats not really a problem.

I don't understand your comment of building libraries by type of font. You do need to "build" the master library, which it will do automatically if you ask it to scan your whole computer. But once the library of fonts is built it seems to be the most flexible program of applying a filter to the fonts displayed. I can filter the list of fonts to say for example, Only OpenTypes, from Adobe, Sans- Serif, containing the text "Pro", that allow embeding. I haven't found any other font manager that will allow that type of controll in selecting the fonts to browse. It's great to just browse type names containing "Times" to see how many variations in different formats and foundaries you have.

It is also one of the few font managers to show all variations, regular, bold, italic, bold italic, etc at once. The other two managers we are discussing do not. This is an advantage if your looking for a good looking ampersand & for example, because the regular, italic and even bold versions can be quite different within the same font. You just need to drag the sample window to a large size, set the sample text to display an ampersand in a large point size. And then maybe set your filter to display Decortive fonts only, then scroll through looking at the variations.

Font Navigators major drawback seems to be your most important criteria which is to display a large character map while scrolling through the fonts. If you don't know what character your looking for you can't put it in the sample text. Font Navigator is not good at looking through dingbat fonts. I wish its character table could be resized and linked to scrolling through the font list like FontExpert.

My most important criteria is the actuall managing of the fonts, which seems to be AMP Font Viewers weak point. It is not very often that you get direct access to a developers ear. Maybe we can talk AmpSoft into further developement of his excellent product. I do think AMP Viewer is probably the best free viewer around. The upgrade to handeling PS fonts was crucial. I look forward to one day saying it is THE best font manager.

Sekrit may have been right <may just have to pick the 2 best and alternate between them> Or maybe even the best three.

Thanks all, NightLord
AND special thanks to AmpSoft, great work.


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