Arjan Mels' Font Viewer

Everyone has its own writing style. However, a computer enriches these styles, letting you use various characters in your text projects. Windows comes with a default collection of fonts, but you can also grab more online. There are also some dedicated applications which help analyze and copy characters from installed fonts, and a suitable example here is Arjan Mels' Font Viewer.

Once the application is installed on your computer, taking it for a spin can be done directly from the last step of the setup process. The main window is pretty clean, neatly displaying its content in a tabbed interface, keeping accommodation efforts to minimum. There’s also a navigation panel to easily browse to a folder where fonts are installed.

Tabs you navigate through let you view general info, extra, license, statistics, metrics, encoding, strings, as well as samples, the entire character map, as well as individual character sets. Chances are you get to spend most of your time in the character map to identify characters of interest.

The main difference between the map, and character set is that the map provides a continuous view of all installed fonts, while the character set only narrows down the view to the selected font type. In either case, you pick a font from a drop-down menu, and it’s even possible to have characters copied to clipboard. Decimal and hexadecimal values are also displayed, as well as keyboard shortcut if available.

Unfortunately, the application feels a little rough around the edges overall, with most of its tab with no practical use, or any relevant information displayed. The font navigator seems to be broken as well, leaving you to use only a few of its features. Even the sample analyzer leaves much to be desired since you can’t pick a different font.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Arjan Mels' Font Viewer feels like an unfinished product overall. Although you are able to view all installed fonts and copy characters of interest, there’s a lot of space which serves no purpose, while features which do actually work could do with improvements.