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FontRevealer for Mac

Explore Unicode font substitution.

Free
In English

FontRevealer overview

FontRevealer is a simple application to explore Unicode font substitution behavior and diagnose troublesome font issues in macOS Cocoa applications.

Q&A
Your screenshot shows the first character to be from a Hiragino font; why don't I see that on my system?

You might not have the Hiragino fonts on your system. In that case, some other font (perhaps Zapf Dingbats) will be used to render the ‘pointing hand’ character.

I select one character in the sample text, and two rows in the table are highlighted; what gives?

You have selected a Unicode composed character that is represented internally using multiple consecutive codes, each shown as a line in the table.

I select one row in the table, and an adjacent row gets highlighted too; what gives?

The rows representing a Unicode composed character are automatically selected as a group.

What are these strange arcs and lines I see in the sample text box?

If you’re seeing that sort of thing then you might have LaTeX fonts installed on your system. These can prevent proper rendering of Unicode characters due to incompatibilities with the Unicode character set used in macOS.

What can I do about these LaTeX fonts?

The LCIRCLE10, LCIRCLEW10, LINE10 and LINEW10 fonts (in the ‘LaTeX screen fonts’ suitcase file) are the usual culprits. You might be able to disable them without loss of functionality if you don't need to render arcs, circles and lines in your LaTeX application.

Can I change the textured window appearance?

Why yes, yes you can. Control-click in the textured border area of the window and you’ll see a popup context menu. Select an alternate texture from the menu. (‘Aqua’ is the default macOS window appearance.)

What’s new in version 1.4

Version 1.4:
  • Built as a 64-bit Universal Binary for Intel and Apple Silicon.
  • Now requires macOS 10.9 or later, and is compatible with macOS 11 (Big Sur).
  • Built with Apple’s Hardened Runtime, sandboxed, signed and notarized.
  • Discontiguous text selection now behaves as expected.
View older FontRevealer versions

FontRevealer for Mac

Free
In English
Version 1.4
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0.0

(2 Reviews of FontRevealer)

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  • User Ratings

Sanjinko
Sanjinko
Mar 11 2012
1.3
0.0
Mar 11 2012
0.0
Version: 1.3
Version 1.3, released on 25 October 2009, is built as a Universal Binary, now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and is compatible with 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
Guest
Guest
Mar 29 2005
1.2
0.0
Mar 29 2005
0.0
Version: 1.2
Thanks for a neat idea. However, the first time I used FontRevealer, to see what fonts were being used in a page of Japanese in Safari where obviously more than one font appeared, the line appeared all in the same font when pasted into FontRevealer. Same thing happened when pasted into TextEdit; obviously it's a System function, not FontRevealer's fault. Maybe has something to do with the second font (Apple LiGothic) being non-Unicode. If I copied a single character of the second font, it retained that font when pasted, but a mixed line defaulted to the Unicode font (STHeiti). Again, not FontRevealer's fault, but something to keep in mind.
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