How to show a word in all the different fonts available?

krs · Feb 28, 2019

Hi,
Is there a way to show in a list a word in all the different fonts available on the Mac.

I have seen lists of the different font styles, but these use the name of the font to show what it looks like.

I would just like to pick a word and show all the different Mac font styles of that particular word

PS: I tried various on line sites that can supposedly identify a font, but I found those useless - seems all the ones I looked at just want to sell you another font.

MacInWin · Feb 28, 2019

You could do that manually in Pages or any other word processor. But there are hundreds of fonts available, and if you really mean ALL, there are thousands that could work on a Mac. I know of no way to have that done automatically.

Font Book is the application to see what fonts look like. Have you tried that? It shows the entire alphabet in that font when you select it.

krs · Feb 28, 2019

Thanks,

I looked at font book, but there I still have to go through all the fonts manually.

I have had this type of issue before, trying to find a suitable font to either compliment an existing one or to just change a number in an existing one.

This time I'm looking for either this font in the attachment, which may be totally unique, or a font that complements this font so that I can add a few words using the annotate feature of the Mac

badshoehabit · Feb 28, 2019

Identify Fonts - The Font Squirrel Matcherator

MacInWin · Feb 28, 2019

What Sue gave you is where I find out what font is being used to see if there is a match. Looking through thousands to see if I can find one manually is way too time consuming.

krs · Feb 28, 2019

As I mentioned in my original post, I have tried a number of these "on-line" font matching sites - none of them could actually identify the font completely and the fonts they suggest (which are similar) are mostly downloadable for a fee.
But even assuming I found the identical font (fee or no fee), then I'm not sure I could figure out how to download it to the Mac so I can use it in preview annodate.

I remember trying that a few years ago and what was supposed to work (with a download0 didn't

So in the end I did the manual exercise going through Font Book which wasn't quite as bad as I thought.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

MacInWin · Feb 28, 2019

Well, the sample you gave was UrsaSerifBold, available as shareware from Fontzillon, which had a link a the site from Sue's post, and which offered a download. From there you use FontBook to make the font available to all your applications. Not sure what's hard about that, but if you want to search manually, that's up to you.

krs · Feb 28, 2019

Thanks Jake, but the font I provided is definitely not UrsaSerifBold - at least not the font that shows here:
https://www.urbanfonts.com/fonts/UrsaSerif_Bold.font

The capital "A" is noticably different, so is the number "9" which I had not posted before.

pm-r · Feb 28, 2019

How to show a word in all the different fonts available?

Sorry I'm a bit late here, but if I'm understanding what you want to do correctly, I'm sure that PopChar.app had such a feature, but I'm not sure exactly where but I didn't look too hard when I tried using it just now.

But I'm sure it had and used the "quick brown fox" sample text but it could be changed to anything you wanted to try.

Anyway, still free to try it I believe.

- Patrick
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badshoehabit · Mar 1, 2019

We take so much for granted. Font development costs a huge amount of money, especially in a world where technology is constantly evolving.

pm-r · Mar 1, 2019

badshoehabit said:
We take so much for granted. Font development costs a huge amount of money, especially in a world where technology is constantly evolving.

So true, and development time, and often there is little returned to the authors, even just in appreciation.

- Patrick
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krs · Mar 1, 2019

badshoehabit said:
Font development costs a huge amount of money, especially in a world where technology is constantly evolving.

Can't argue with that, but do we really need a few hundred thousands fonts?

There are tons that are very, very similar; for instance the one MacInWin posted, UrsaSerifBold - close to what I posted but not identical.
Even the small subset that is included with the Mac has many fonts that are very similar to each other.