A Quick Look at your fonts

Apple’s site, apple.com has a page where new fea­tures of Mac OsX 10.5, Leop­ard are explained.

I’ve just started to gaze through this stuff. 300+ new or changed fea­tures is more than enough to jus­tify the upgrade. It is, by the way, much cheaper to upgrade from Tiger to Leop­ard than lets say from Win­dows XP to Win­dows Vista.

In this wast overview of Leop­ard there is amaz­ingly enough no men­tion of how it has become one of the best font view­ers avail­able and cer­tainly the fastest one.

Quick Look is an impres­sive new tool in Leop­ard. With it you can pre­view in a very fast way all kinds of doc­u­ments, pic­tures, movies and so on. Quick Look looks into the files so to speak for infor­ma­tion to make the pre­views. And so it does too for fonts. Clean crisp pre­views from either the screen font or the print font, if we are talk­ing about post­script fonts or sim­ply from the Open­Type fonts or what have you. As it says there: Open­ing files is so 2006!

There are few ways to view a file in Quick Look:

  • Right click to find Quick Look in a Con­tex­u­tal Menu, or
  • Go: File > Quick Look in the Finder menu, or
  • Com­mand + Y on the key­board, or the fastest manner:
  • Use the Spacbar

Hav­ing selected a font, hit the Space­bar and get a pre­view of a font like this. To flip over to the next font use the Up and Down Arrows to move arround. The win­dow can be resized at will depend­ing on your screen of course. All with a beau­ti­ful crisp preview.

quicklook

You close the win­dow again by either click­ing with the mouse at the x but­ton in the upper left cor­ner or hit the Space­bar again. If some­one finds out how one can change what por­tion of the alpha­bet is shown I sure would like to know how to hack that.

iconpreviewfontBesides Quick Look Leop­ard now has new kind of icons, pre­view icons. Icons of pho­tographs change if you change the pic­ture. For fonts we now have the let­ters Ag as pre­set pre­view icons. This is extremely handy for those who do not know their fonts that well and are only look­ing for some serif font or a dec­o­ra­tive one for a birth­day card. Here I really would like to be able to hack this to seclect what char­ac­ters are shown in the icons. It would be nice to see at glance what fonts are miss­ing the Ice­landic eth’s and thorn’s. And don’t for­get that you can resize your icons in the Icon View.

Of course fonts can also be viewed with Cover Flow, the new Finder view­ing tool (Com­mand + 4). This is fine for view­ing fonts that are inside the Library/Fonts fold­ers but for view­ing font col­lec­tions buried in end­less num­ber of fold­ers it can be a bit of a drag. But it’s worth the try if you are quick with your fin­gers open­ing and clos­ing fold­ers with Com­mand + Right/Left Arrows and mov­ing up and down your list of fonts with the Up and Down Arrows. Cover Flow pre­view­ing is also lim­ited to the Ag glyphs which makes it usable only for quick searching.

dalkaviewfonts

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