Font viewers 

cmd:gucharmap 

Info 

Unicode character picker and font browser

Description 

This program allows you to browse through all the available Unicode characters and categories for the installed fonts, and to examine their detailed properties. It is an easy way to find the character you might only know by its Unicode name or code point.

Features 

gucharmap uses gtk+ 2.0, so it supports beautiful truetype fonts.

documented on: 2006.11.27

cmd:gfontview 

Usage 

gfontview [file]
gfontview [directory]

Info 

font viewer for Type 1 and TrueType fonts

Description 

gfontview is a font viewer for outline fonts, PostScript(tm) Type 1 and TrueType(tm).

Tag: interface::x11, role::sw:utility, suite::gnome, uitoolkit::gtk, use::viewing, works-with::font, x11::application

Features 

  • gfontview allows you to display a particular character or string of a font in an own window, thus allowing a comparison between several fonts with a particular string sample. This character or string can be antialiased (smoothed). The string can also consider the kerning pairs if available in the AFM or TTF file. The displayed character or string can be saved in GIF format.
  • A table with all glyphs in the font (for PostScript Type 1 fonts also in several encodings) can also be created. A custom encoding will be generated on the fly to allow you to see all characters (also not encoded ones) in a Type 1 font, the so called "Custom" encodings.
  • You can also print a sample of a font. The program generates PostScript code with sample strings in several sizes, which you can download to any PostScript printer or to ghostscript.
  • TrueType fonts can be saved as Type42 PostScript fonts.

documented on: 2006.11.27