Gallery of installed fonts

fontconfigfontsx11

I want to view the fonts that are installed on my system. Specifically, I want the client-side (fontconfig) fonts, not the old-style X11 bitmap fonts on the server (for which xfontsel does an adequate job). I guess what I'm looking for would be called a font viewer or font gallery. I want to see a bit of sample text for each font, ideally configurable sample text.

Being able to filter by font name, available character sets and other characteristics would be a plus.

A search of packages in Debian wheezy found gnome-font-viewer and kfontview, but they can only display a single font. I'd rather avoid depending on software that isn't widely available, including on the current Debian stable and Ubuntu LTS.

Best Answer

font-manager allows you to make collections of fonts for manual categorization, etc. It also allows some searching, by font "type" which includes things like script, decorative, text, etc. It is in Debian.

It has a compare feature that lets you compare multiple fonts with your choice of text. It also has a browse screen that shows all fonts at once (well, or at least as many as fit on your screen, it has a scrollbar).

Note that it creates a ~/.fonts.conf if you don't already have one. You'll have to clean this up for newer fontconfigs (jessie and later, I believe).

font-manager screenshot

Related Solutions

Changing monospace fonts system-wide

Add this to yours ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file to set Font B as default monospace font

<match target="pattern">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
    <string>monospace</string>
  </test>
  <edit binding="strong" mode="prepend" name="family">
    <string>Font B</string>
  </edit>
</match>

Or to /etc/fonts/local.conf to set it system-wide.

Libvte unicode font handling

Actually, xterm (and xfd) can use TrueType fonts, using the -fa option. With the latter, you can see that 0xee20 is missing from the font:

Given that, xterm would show a missing glyph (because it uses only one font). Likely vte is doing the same because none of the fallback fonts which it may be using has this particular private use code.

For comparison, here is a screenshot with xfd displaying the PCF font (which does have the glyph):

Whether the fonts are "identical" depends on how they were created (and maintained). I see 7 missing glyphs on the screenshot of the TrueType font, and none on the PCF font.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Changing monospace fonts system-wide

Libvte unicode font handling

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