Comments on: Yes, even MS Comic Sans

Yes, even MS Comic Sans

slater — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:32:04 -0800

Enter some text and see it written in all the fonts installed on your system

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:36:42 -0800

the quick brown fox jumps over [remainder redacted]

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:37:01 -0800

Also, this is good.

By: regicide is good for you

regicide is good for you — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:41:40 -0800

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

By: maudlin

maudlin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:46:43 -0800

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

By: defenestration

defenestration — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:49:50 -0800

I'm fairly certain there are more than 10 fonts on my system. x10

By: YoBananaBoy

YoBananaBoy — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:56:10 -0800

Fun, but yes, I'm being shortchanged on fonts. It's because I'm Canadian, right? What, no Canadian Typewriter?

By: equalpants

equalpants — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:58:11 -0800

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)?

By: furtive

furtive — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:01:39 -0800

Slick.

By: localhuman

localhuman — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:05:50 -0800

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

By: lilkeith07

lilkeith07 — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:06:19 -0800

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.

By: ssg

ssg — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:06:39 -0800

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).

By: Mister_A

Mister_A — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:08:54 -0800

Sorry, but does not do what it says on the tin.

By: isopraxis

isopraxis — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:10:39 -0800

Hmm. Am I invoking Godwin if I complain that Fraktur isn't showing?

By: netbros

netbros — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:14:29 -0800

Why the long face?

By: Johnny Porno

Johnny Porno — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:18:34 -0800

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.

By: estherbester

estherbester — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:23:45 -0800

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.

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:24:57 -0800

typetester is much better (at least for web-design purposes.)

By: camcgee

camcgee — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:28:32 -0800

I'm not sure what it is actually doing, but whatever it is, it works on Safari on an iPod Touch.

By: mattoxic

mattoxic — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:30:00 -0800

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

By: wilful

wilful — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:34:44 -0800

no not true, I looked at my font list, typed it in up the top black bit, it came up.

By: miss lynnster

miss lynnster — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:35:38 -0800

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...

By: Upal

Upal — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:35:57 -0800

Here's another one (not as detailed as typetester) FontBrowser

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:37:58 -0800

flipping typical is not a misnomer, people!

By: Popular Ethics

Popular Ethics — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:41:40 -0800

Really useful (even with the limited sample of fonts). Thanks!

By: cjorgensen

cjorgensen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:49:35 -0800

Who needs more than three fonts? Four if you insist on having a monospace font.

By: wendell

wendell — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:05:46 -0800

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...

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:07:54 -0800

Do not font.

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:08:01 -0800

Gee, it doesn't work for me at all, as far as I can tell. Maybe the problem is I'm on linux.

By: katillathehun

katillathehun — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:16:01 -0800

What the... I have Papyrus? Bloody hell (.ttf)!

By: CCBC

CCBC — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:28:40 -0800

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.

By: slater

slater — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:47:58 -0800

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.

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:51:05 -0800

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.

By: dawson

dawson — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:04:51 -0800

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

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:06:44 -0800

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.

By: sturob

sturob — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:19:27 -0800

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

By: CCBC

CCBC — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:32:53 -0800

>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.

By: stupidsexyFlanders

stupidsexyFlanders — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:33:30 -0800

there are still glitches on windows Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town

By: twoleftfeet

twoleftfeet — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:40:52 -0800

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.

By: typewriter

typewriter — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:52:06 -0800

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

By: alcoholiday

alcoholiday — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:58:23 -0800

And there is also ṂÖ♰ⓁⅠℲѰ which "Motlifies" (as in "Mötley Crüe") your text using characters that kind of look like other characters.

By: Ogre Lawless

Ogre Lawless — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:39:45 -0800

And there is also ṂÖ♰ⓁⅠℲѰ Sadly, I get Unicode blox on both FF and IE on this WinXP machine...

By: bonobothegreat

bonobothegreat — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:19:17 -0800

ǝʇıs sıɥʇ ʇɐ uʍopǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ dılɟ uɐɔ noʎ

By: spilon

spilon — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:22:08 -0800

This thread is useless without Comic Sans.

By: lometogo

lometogo — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:02:09 -0800

How do I find out ¨all the fonts installed on my system¨?

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:10:19 -0800

@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.

By: tehloki

tehloki — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:38:49 -0800

ℋ℧ⓇℲ ⒹЦŔƒ