googlefonts / fontview

Demo app that displays fonts with a free/libre/open-source text rendering stack: FreeType, HarfBuzz and Raqm

FontView

“FontView” is a little demo app that shows the contents of a font file. It opens *.ttf, *.otf, *.ttc, *.otc, *.pfa, and *.pfb files. To render text, FontView uses the open-source libraries FreeType, HarfBuzz, and Raqm. FontView is not an official Google product; use it at your own risk.

You’re very welcome to contribute changes, for example if you’d like porting the tool to other platforms than macOS. (Because the program only calls cross-platform libraries, porting should actually be quite easy). Likewise, please don’t hesitate to add new features; simply send a GitHub pull request when your change is ready.

Building on macOS

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/googlefonts/fontview.git;
# if you forget the recursive arg, run
# git submodule update --init --recursive
$ cd fontview
$ python2.7 build.py && ./build/FontView.app/Contents/MacOS/fontview

Building on Linux

You need to first install wxWidgets as well as latest versions of FreeType, HarfBuzz and FriBiDi.

$ git clone https://github.com/googlefonts/fontview.git
$ cd fontview
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update src/third_party/raqm/libraqm
$ python build.py && ./build/fontview