Thanks for the feedback, HandyMac. There are at least three reasons why you might see the results you mention. First, the fonts the system will choose for rendering a particular string of text depend on the context of the string, so if you take one piece of a web page you can get different fonts depending on which piece you grab. Second, Safari could be forcing particular fonts to be used when doing its own rendering but not when copying text to the pasteboard. Third, Safari may not be using bog-standard Cocoa text rendering (there are other approaches available in OS X). If you send me the URL of the page you were looking at, and let me know exactly what string you pasted, I will do some experiments and see if there is anything interesting to be learned.

In general it isn't possible to know what fonts (or font rendering mechanism) another app is using without reaching into its memory, and that's not what I was after in writing FontRevealer. It's more for exploring font substitution behavior in text and/or apps that are within your control.

Cheers, Kelvin -- support at nomicro dot com.