How to view a TTF font file?

Question

Is there an application to simply preview a font from a TTF file without installing it?

Solution 1

I use character maps heavily and decides to make one which you access from anywhere using a web interface and requires no installation. Works best on Chrome.

Features

• Select your own font file
• Provides font and character information
• Character copy-able
• Supports TTF/OTF
• Supports Icon fonts
• Simple interface
• No installation necessary
• No server upload necessary

Screenshot

Solution 2

gnome-font-viewer (part of GNOME of course) can do this (this is the default association for fonts under GNOME); indeed, it comes with a button to install the font, which obviously wouldn't make sense if the font needed to be installed already.

fontmatrix lets you organize groups of fonts to be installed or uninstalled, and you can preview them and see their features, whether installed or not.

Most font editors, like fontforge, certainly don't require the fonts to be installed to open them up and look at them...

There are others, I'm sure.

Solution 3

display OpenSans-CondBold.ttf

display is part of imagemagick, so you will need it to be installed.

Answer possible thanks to this forum post.

This problem has been bugging me for years, because it is only every few months that I want to preview a font and I never remembered which software solved it last time, so I made a video version of this answer to make it easier to find in the future.

Solution 4

Font Manager is very handy for previewing and comparing fonts. It allows you to install TTF files, even if zipped, and will preview them pretty quickly. It does install them in your ~/.fonts directory, but it's pretty easy to remove them.

Solution 5

GNOME Characters

Characters is a simple utility application to find and insert unusual characters.

Requires font installation but displays emojis for me where gnome-font-viewer fails. Install through snap or compile.

sudo snap install gnome-characters

View more solutions

Comments

[Mr Lister]

Very nice. But I can't see how to navigate through the characters. It shows ranges of 200 chars, but clicking on those ranges doesn't do anything, so only the first 200 chars are ever visible.

[textshell]

It seems the version on that link has a bug. Running the version from github.com/bluejamesbond/CharacterMap locally works (needs node and npm)

[Calamar]

opentype.js.org

[phil294]

not installed by default in all ubuntu variations. thanks.

[Chris Stokes]

I get an error "TypeError: glyph is undefined" when trying to upload "Noto Color Emoji" font (google.com/get/noto/#emoji-zsye-color)

[Ismail Iqbal]

Nice tool, would have been great if we could search from the unicode

[user202729]

Related: imagemagick display: different text in font preview - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange