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Is there a tool on Linux that would allow me to preview Unicode fonts. Fontforge allows me to see the available glyphs and Unicode ranges, but the display is very crude. Gnome font viewer shows only the Latin range.

Ideally the tool would accept a string in a given encoding and then show the preview for the string.

Regards.

Basel Shishani
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2 Answers2

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GNOME Character Map (installed on most gnome-friendly systems, try charmap) can give you what you need.

  • I have a font file - say a Truetype font file, and I want to see how the font provided in the file looks like. I can open the file in Fontforge or gnome viewer and get some info, is there a tool that allows me to open the file and get a nice preview of the font in any desired code range not just Latin? – Basel Shishani Mar 23 '12 at 05:21
  • See for yourself: [A screenshot of charmap showing Greek glyphs](http://images.bluegartr.com/bucket/gallery/e96bf8291be36a4a872307b09beece0b.png). –  Mar 23 '12 at 05:26
  • I can see it on my screen :) This was bit fussy of me, I was after something where I can enter a sentence and see the different styles of it. But charmap does give me a reasonable idea and solves my problem. Thanks. – Basel Shishani Mar 23 '12 at 05:32
  • Actually charmap is very crude. It displays all fonts mingled together even when selecting "display only gliphs from this font" and it's a mess. I have yet to find a solution to display SMuFL fonts (which use the Private Use Area of Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, namely U+E000 through U+FFFF) – Davide Feb 03 '20 at 20:09
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I'd recommend to use FontMatrix. It's playground feature may suite your needs: area, where you can place text in any font/style and compare them.

site seems to be broken, but you can install it from your repository.

Stas Bushuev
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