So, yeah, basically the title …

I am in search for a good and simple and modern font viewing application. But there seems to be nothing that matches my criteria.

  • The software needs to be independent from any desktop environment, because I don’;t use one and i am not willing to install what feels like hundreds of specific dependencies

  • The software also should not be a font manager, I can manage my fonts absolutely fine by my own.

  • The software also does not need any features to view “installed and uninstalled” fonts (a term I come across – whatever that means), just give it a file name as parameter and view that font in the GUI.

  • The software should not be dead (i.e. last upstream change over a decade ago, using a dead graphics toolkit, not working on Wayland, etc.).

But either I forgot how to search the web or there seems to be no such application. All I wound was either decades old, dead software, or overly complicated and complex font managers or modules for the two common desktop environments.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance :)

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    12·
    2 days ago

    It isn’t a dedicated font viewer, but I’ve used ImageMagick’s display utility to preview fonts.

  • siha@feddit.ukEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    Not sure if it counts, but gnome-font-viewer might fit the bill.

    You can probably run something like gnome-font-viewer /usr/share/fonts/open-sans/OpenSans-Regular.ttf and it should show you the font, although I haven’t verified that myself.

    Here are it’s dependencies:

    $ dnf repoquery --requires gnome-font-viewer
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
libadwaita-1.so.0()(64bit)
libadwaita-1.so.0(LIBADWAITA_1_0)(64bit)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libcairo.so.2()(64bit)
libfontconfig.so.1()(64bit)
libfreetype.so.6()(64bit)
libfribidi.so.0()(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1()(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1(GCC_3.0)(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1(GCC_3.3.1)(64bit)
libgio-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libglib-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgobject-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgraphene-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgtk-4.so.1()(64bit)
libharfbuzz.so.0()(64bit)
libm.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
libpango-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
rtld(GNU_HASH)

    It does also let you view fonts installed on your system, but I don’t see why that should be a deal-breaker.

    There is also the display command, provided by ImageMagick. My understanding is that it only supports X11, but it should work just fine under XWayland.

  • mech@feddit.org
    11·
    2 days ago

    I see you are an experienced Linux user.
    Complaining that something doesn’t exist on Linux, instead of asking for advice in the title -
    Triggers people who want to help and people who want to correct you.

  • hades@feddit.uk
    4·
    2 days ago

    What features do you need? Just render a string with a given font and that’s it? Or something more advanced?

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      2 days ago

      Ideally something that allows me to see the characters in a table, sorted by character blocks, like in the LibreOffice “Insert Special Characters” dialog, so that I’m not limited to some predefined text but being able to see all characters.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          1 day ago

          KCharSelect

          It just installs kcharselect … and figuratively half of KDE :)

          There seems to be a Flatpak available I’ll check out later when I have time to install hundreds of megabyte of depending other KDE-specific Flatpaks …

          • nyan@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            1 day ago

            The TDE version of kcharselect should do much the same stuff with fewer deps, if a suitable package exists for your distro.

            • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlOP
              1·
              17 hours ago

              Mmmh, nope, only the normal version available.

              The Flatpak version (or KCharSelect in general) unfortunately ignores the font file given on command line.