Font Xplorer allows you to choose the “perfect font” for a specific job and perform all types of font management & printing chores, such as:

Browse both installed fonts and archived fonts from disk

View each font and easily compare all or selected fonts

Special user text compare mode allows you to find perfect font in seconds

Load, install, unload, uninstall, manage fonts

Print pre-designed, professional sample sheets and font listings

Save bitmap images of fonts

Search for duplicate fonts, CRC check

Rename font files to use font’s full name with undo support (from arialbi.ttf to Arial Bold Italic.ttf)

Comprehensive font info is available (full name, copyright, embedding info, available character sets etc.)

Advanced, resizeable character map that shows all a font’s scripts and allows you to zoom in on any character. You can even copy a symbol to the clipboard as vector image, not text

View extended font metrics information

Instantly view the installation status of fonts

Filter fonts by character set, so you only see symbol fonts for example

Mark fonts and optionally view only marked fonts

Integrated Repair Wizard helps solve most common font problems

Extensive support for calling external programs, support for different variables in callable command lines

Font Xplorer works with TrueType fonts only.

Basics

When you run Font Xplorer you see a list of fonts that are installed (actually loaded) in your system. Each font is drawn with its own face so you can very easily choose the best font for your task. That way, you’ll have a complete overview of fonts available in your system or in a disk folder. You can change the size of the fonts displayed (View -> Font Size), toggle the display of font names (View -> Font names),or only display fonts that have a specific character set (Filter -> Character Set) etc. This last mode is very useful if you want to see only symbol fonts for example, or all fonts that contain cyrillic characters…

Sometimes you may want to compare your own text string drawn with different fonts so that you can choose the perfect one for a specific task. See the User Text Mode for more info.

Also, you may find it useful to browse fonts from certain a folder directly, instead of seeing only loaded fonts. See the Folder Browser mode.

By right-clicking on the font list, the font context-menu is displayed. This menu contains some extremely useful commands that allow you to manipulate selected font(s) . Try right-clicking any object since many objects have a special context-menu that lists commands available for that object.

To refresh the font listing use the Refresh command in the View menu.

Moving Around

You can navigate through the list of fonts with the arrow keys. This is an ordinary Windows list box where up and down arrows move to the previous/next font. Home moves to the top and End moves to the end of the listing. In addition, if you want to jump directly to a font that starts with a specified letter, just press that character key on the keyboard. Press it again and the next font that starts with this character will be selected. For example if you are on the top of the list, but want to jump to fonts whose name starts with T, just press the T key on keyboard and your are there.

To find the previous/next checked font use Ctrl+Up / Down

To scroll a whole page at a time use Page Up/Page Down

    For fast scrolling, you can hold down the Ctrl key when dragging the scroll bar. Fonts will then not be drawn on the list during scrolling; instead, you’ll see a tooltip with the current topmost font name.

Selecting Fonts

To manipulate a font(s) (copy/move/delete/load/install/print etc) you need to select or activate it first. You can activate a font by selecting it with the mouse. That is called single-selection (activating). If you want to select multiple fonts and manipulate them at the same time, you need to switch to the check box mode. (View -> Checkboxes). You can then select each font by clicking it’s check box. To unselect a font, click the check mark again. You’ll see the count of selected/total fonts on status bar.

You can also select a range of fonts at once. For this, activate the font that is first in the range, then hold down the Shift key and click on last font’s check box. That selects all fonts that are in the range from the previously active font to the clicked font.

There are some powerful commands for selecting fonts in the Select sub menu of the Font menu. You can also access this menu also by clicking on the status bar, where font count is displayed (last panel).

Ctrl+Up/Down arrow will jump to previous/next selected (checked) font.

    To toggle the selection of active font, press the Spacebar key.

The number of fonts selected is visible in the status bar. You can also see the total number of listed fonts there.

Once you have selected fonts, you can use the Show Selected Files only mode (Filter -> Selected Files Only). Then only files that you have selected are visible in the listing.

Status Bar

Font Xplorer‘s status bar contains 4 panels. The first panel displays information about the font that is currently under the mouse pointer. The next panel displays  the font size, in points, used to draw the sample text. The third panel displays the currently active character set. By clicking this panel with the mouse you can display the character set popup menu; right-clicking changes active character set to ‘All’. The last panel displays counts of selected and listed fonts. By clicking on the last panel you can bring up the Select popup menu, the same as you find in the Font menu.

Operating Modes

Font Xplorer has 2 main operating modes, loaded fonts mode and disk fonts mode.

Loaded fonts mode (View -> Loaded Fonts) is the default mode and displays all fonts that are loaded in your system. These are all the fonts you can use in your programs at the moment. This allows you to choose the perfect font for your task from the fonts that are available to programs.

Disk fonts mode, on other hand, allows you to see fonts that are not loaded or installed. They are just font files in a folder. Font Xplorer then displays a folder contents view of the files. There are 2 ways to tell Font Xplorer which folder to browse:

1. Enable the Folder Browser tree (View -> Folder Browser) so you can navigate through your file system like in Windows Explorer. If you click on a folder, Font Xplorer will display all fonts that are in this folder (if any).
2. Choose the folder from your Favorites list.

If you need to display a fonts listing of the folder including all subfolders, hold down the Ctrl key when you choose the folder from the browser or from the Favorites list. Then you see a * character after a folder name on the Font Xplorer caption that means fonts from all subfolders of the folder are listed.

You cannot change the character set in disk fonts mode.