Font Tap

Windows delivers a wide variety of tools and resources to handle most operations you need to perform on a computer, and this includes quite a rich variety of fonts. These can be explored through a built-in mapper, but for an extended set of options you can use Font Tap to also export specific characters as pictures.

The application can perfectly run as soon as the download process is done since it requires no installation in order to function. As such, it can be easily stored on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own. Fonts are only read, so registry entries are not modified, thus the target PC’s health status remains intact.

On the visual side of things, it pretty much resembles the system Character Map, but with a few extra functions and buttons. All characters in the selected font set are shown in a dedicated space, while selection highlights the specific cell, and also shows the character in a preview area which is exactly what you get on export.

What the application actually does is to help you save a specific character as a picture you can use in other projects. The format is always BMP. The background color can be changed, but it would have been useful to see the possibility to configure alpha level.

The font of interest is selected from a dedicated drop-down menu. Font can also be enhanced with attributes like bold, italic, underline, and color. Size of font determines output image height, while width needs to be manually configured.

Unfortunately, a large variety of fonts are not supported by the application, with most characters being shown as placeholders. Saving doesn’t fix this inconvenience, which has a considerable impact on overall practicality.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Font Tap comes with good intentions, but isn’t quite prepared to deliver the intended result. You can only export one character at a time, but not on a transparent background, while the lack of support for some font sets can make you look for alternatives.