Yes, even MS Comic Sans

January 5, 2009 9:32 PM

Enter some text and see it written in all the fonts installed on your system
posted by slater (46 comments total)

the quick brown fox jumps over [remainder redacted]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:36 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

Also, this is good.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:37 PM on January 5

I'm fairly certain there are more than 10 fonts on my system.
posted by regicide is good for you at 9:41 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

Fun, but yes, I'm being shortchanged on fonts. It's because I'm Canadian, right?
posted by maudlin at 9:46 PM on January 5

I'm fairly certain there are more than 10 fonts on my system.

x10
posted by defenestration at 9:49 PM on January 5

Fun, but yes, I'm being shortchanged on fonts. It's because I'm Canadian, right?

What, no Canadian Typewriter?
posted by YoBananaBoy at 9:56 PM on January 5

Doesn't see all my fonts either. Also, what it claims is "Helvetica" is actually Arial; I don't even have Helvetica. Am I just using the wrong browser (Firefox 3)?
posted by equalpants at 9:58 PM on January 5

Slick.
posted by furtive at 10:01 PM on January 5

For sakes! And I've spent all this money on fonts that this website doesn't even recognize I have?

oh arial, how I love you
posted by localhuman at 10:05 PM on January 5

Yeah it doesn't see all the fonts that I have either. Would have been nice if it worked seeing as I have about 1200 fonts and need to sort them out.
posted by lilkeith07 at 10:06 PM on January 5

The site only checks about 75 different fonts, so it is pretty unlikely that it will find all the fonts on your system. Even then, it seems to be missing some from the fonts I have that are on the list it checks against (Verdana, for example).
posted by ssg at 10:06 PM on January 5

Sorry, but does not do what it says on the tin.
posted by Mister_A at 10:08 PM on January 5

Hmm. Am I invoking Godwin if I complain that Fraktur isn't showing?
posted by isopraxis at 10:10 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

Why the long face?
posted by netbros at 10:14 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

If you don't see a font that you know you have, you can type its name into the black bar at the top and it will display it.
posted by Johnny Porno at 10:18 PM on January 5

It's a very slick site! I spent a few minutes earlier this afternoon typing in the different font names as the dummy text. Funny to see how "Helvetica" looks in Garamond, Arial, Gill Sans, etc. I had to procrastinate, really bad.
posted by estherbester at 10:23 PM on January 5

typetester is much better (at least for web-design purposes.)
posted by Rhomboid at 10:24 PM on January 5 [5 favorites]

I'm not sure what it is actually doing, but whatever it is, it works on Safari on an iPod Touch.
posted by camcgee at 10:28 PM on January 5

WOA, Arial looks like that!?? No way!

It isn't actually ALL the fonts installed, it's the same fonts installed on my computer as they have on their server. So.... meh
posted by mattoxic at 10:30 PM on January 5

no not true, I looked at my font list, typed it in up the top black bit, it came up.
posted by wilful at 10:34 PM on January 5

I wish it showed all of the fonts I have activated through Suitcase too instead of just the few that are in my system folder...
posted by miss lynnster at 10:35 PM on January 5

Here's another one (not as detailed as typetester) FontBrowser
posted by Upal at 10:35 PM on January 5

flipping typical is not a misnomer, people!
posted by iamkimiam at 10:37 PM on January 5

Really useful (even with the limited sample of fonts). Thanks!
posted by Popular Ethics at 10:41 PM on January 5

Who needs more than three fonts? Four if you insist on having a monospace font.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:49 PM on January 5

It bears repeating: type the name of a font it's missing into the black bar on top and faster than you can say Bookman, there it is! I'm up to 62 of my installed fonts right now, only 1278 to go...
posted by wendell at 11:05 PM on January 5

Do not font.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:07 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

Gee, it doesn't work for me at all, as far as I can tell.

Maybe the problem is I'm on linux.
posted by Netzapper at 11:08 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

What the... I have Papyrus? Bloody hell (.ttf)!
posted by katillathehun at 11:16 PM on January 5

I've used FontLister for years (I still have 2.0 installed and officially it's up to 3.4) and been very happy with it. I don't understand why you would want to see the version of a font that is on someone else's server rather than the one you have at hand. And typing in all those font names is just too time-consuming to even think about. With FontLister, you type in the copy, click "Compare" and it shows the copy in all the fonts you own.
posted by CCBC at 11:28 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

I don't understand why you would want to see the version of a font that is on someone else's server rather than the one you have at hand.

Me neither, but that's not what flipping typical does.
posted by slater at 11:47 PM on January 5

All this is doing is specifying a font face for some text on a web page, which in one form or another has been possible for over a decade. You get to control which font face to display, and, assuming the face is on your system, your browser will display the text using that font; otherwise your browser chooses some default font instead. That's the way it's always been.
posted by twoleftfeet at 11:51 PM on January 5

What should this work on?
Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, IE7+. OS/X a fair bit nicer than Windows

posted by dawson at 12:04 AM on January 6

OK, it's more clever than I realized at first. It's measuring the dimensions of characters of some hidden text string and using that to guess which fonts are being displayed correctly in your browser. Useful for guessing if a PC does have one of the standard (but non-traditional) fonts, but it seems unlikely that every pair of different fonts has different dimensions for their characters, so it's usefulness as a font browser is suspect.
posted by twoleftfeet at 12:06 AM on January 6

huh, forgot i had a mefi account. glad to see a decent discussion going on.

so yeah, currently it only checks against a fairly small list of fonts this is because:
1) i thought it would slow down if there were too many (i probably should have benchmarked tho)
and
2) as it logs everytime someone successfully adds a font, i can add the most popular ones to the db going forward

and yeah there are still glitches on windows
posted by sturob at 1:19 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

>assuming the face is on your system, your browser will display the text using that font; otherwise your browser chooses some default font instead.
Um, doesn't it depend on the font in the browser used by the person viewing the page? This may be helpful in determining a second choice, say, coding a font-family first choice (like Verdana) and a family second choice (like Georgia) in case the first choice isn't in the browser of the person viewing the site. But, really, is it that useful?

slater: I do think that's what flipping typical does. It doesn't show the fonts on my hard drive but only those it can locate on a server. I've tried several faces that won't show and I haven't even gotten to the hard stuff, like different foundry versions of the same face. These are browser faces, which is okay (I guess), if that's what you're doing, but it isn't good for me since I go to print.
posted by CCBC at 1:32 AM on January 6

there are still glitches on windows

Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 1:33 AM on January 6 [2 favorites]

As long as you're here, sturob, how do you know that popular fonts will give different dimensions than whatever font-face you're using for the parent element? I mean, this is probably true for the common small list of installed fonts, but what if I have 1000+ fonts?

That said, it's a clever idea.
posted by twoleftfeet at 1:40 AM on January 6

What, no Canadian Typewriter?
posted by YoBananaBoy at 12:56 AM on January 6 [+] [!]

Yes? Oh. Nevermind.
posted by typewriter at 5:52 AM on January 6

And there is also ṂÖ♰ⓁⅠℲѰ which "Motlifies" (as in "Mötley Crüe") your text using characters that kind of look like other characters.
posted by alcoholiday at 5:58 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

And there is also ṂÖ♰ⓁⅠℲѰ

Sadly, I get Unicode blox on both FF and IE on this WinXP machine...
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:39 AM on January 6

ǝʇıs sıɥʇ ʇɐ uʍopǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ dılɟ uɐɔ noʎ
posted by bonobothegreat at 1:19 PM on January 6

This thread is useless without Comic Sans.
posted by spilon at 2:22 PM on January 6

How do I find out ¨all the fonts installed on my system¨?
posted by lometogo at 6:02 PM on January 6

@bonobothegreat

Wow, it took me a long time to figure out how they were doing that. It looks pretty good, too. Totally had me fooled.
posted by Netzapper at 7:10 PM on January 6

ℋ℧ⓇℲ ⒹЦŔƒ
posted by tehloki at 9:38 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]