Typefacer

Although not of really great importance when sharing your life goals or events with friends on Facebook, fonts go a long way back, with various applications that even let you design your own character sets. However, to view them, you can use applications like Typefacer which also let you test them out.

As soon as it starts, the application wants to let you know it means business, and it does this through a cool, fresh interface, that blends well in any environment you might be working. A side panel acts as a navigation system through all fonts installed on your computer, with a character map and sample sheet covering the rest of the space.

A simple selection of a font puts all of its characters at your disposal. There’s even a large canvas with capital letters, lower case, numbers, and symbols so you get a better idea of how they look in a text editor. What’s more, you can click the canvas and start typing, and then copy the text to a different application. Just make sure not to paste plain text if you want to keep the specific font.

Unfortunately, there seems to be more focus put in the development of the interface than any other area the application covers. Apart from viewing, there’s little else you can do, except place characters from the map into a simple text field, from which they can be sent to your clipboard.

Font size can be set from a slider that goes from 2 to 72, letting you view changes in real time. However, there is an strong inconsistency between the list of fonts and how they’re displayed, and what appears on the canvas you write. For instance, you can’t drag or use characters from the map, and using the keyboard on a symbol-based font only writes in the default font.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Typefacer is mostly a well-intended application that tries to grab your attention through pretty visuals, and make you somehow ignore the shallow set of features. Not all fonts are displayed as they’re actually designed, there’s no possibility to view the total number of installed fonts, and neither can you search for a specific one.