This little program can help you keep track of all the fonts installed in your FreeGEOS system by providing an easy way for creating samples of every printable font.
Usage is really simple: after launching, the program opens a dialog where you only have to click the "Update List" command to create a list with samples of all the currently installed fonts. You can use the Edit menu or the mouse to mark all or parts of the text and transfer it to other applications (typically GeoWrite), where the samples can be printed.
For each font, the program displays its name and the internal ID number. The font ID is important for the compatibility of documents you exchange with other people. After that, two lines of the classic "quick brown fox" text are used to show all the upper and lower case characters.
The third line shows a selection of special characters to help you in checking the completeness and proper conversion of the font. The sample line contains the following components:
- The word "AVATAR", which is usually a good indication of whether font contains any kerning data (rare!) - if so, the "A" letters are drawn noticeably closer to the "V" and the "T" to reduce the amount of empty space between them.
- The digits "123" for checking if numbers are included.
- The punctuation symbols "+;#" (plus, semicolon, hash mark/number sign).
- The German diacritic symbols for a-Umlaut in upper and lower case (i.e. the letter "a"/"A" with two dots above it), together with the German "sz" ligature (looks somewhat like a Greek "beta"). If these are properly displayed, chances are that most other accented characters are available as well.
- The symbol at position DBh in the Geos character set (key combination: Ctrl-Shift-Alt-$). In standard Geos fonts, this is a currency symbol consisting of a circle with four little "ears". Burkhard Oerttel proposed redefining this character for displaying the new "Euro" currency symbol (a captial "C" with two horizontal lines through the middle). This convention is used for example by the Optifonts collection.
Alternatively, you can enter your own sample text in the FontList dialog before clicking "Update List". This can be useful if you want to check the appearance of a font with a specific passage of text (for example, a few sentences from a famous speech...).
Another reason to use this is to reduce the complexity of the sample text (e.g. replacing it by only "ABC") if you experience crashes with a large number of fonts installed.