So, lately I'm running more and more into a problem that I can't easily pick a font within an application... maybe it's selected in a resource file (various games), maybe it's only applied on restarting the program (curse you VLC player!), maybe it has to be configured in html style and so you have to have a font name in mind already (Anki2, what did you do?)
Of course I can pop open OpenOffice and type a few lines of any given font, and the windows control panel will tell me which few fonts it believes were designed for Japanese, but... testing in a word processor lies to you in funny ways, since fonts that don't contain Japanese will fall back on some other font to render Japanese characters, and there are plenty of fonts that have Japanese characters but don't have the right field set for Windows to claim they were 'designed for' Japanese.
So I'm looking for a font viewer (or other program that happens to have font examination built into it) that will ideally tell me everything there is to know about a font file, in particular whether it's a 'unicode' font in whatever sense VLC requires to work with Japanese subtitles, and of course to render out the complete character set for examination (or at least the Japanese character set), and of course, I want to know all the ways I can identify the font when I need to type in its name (in case I need to identify it by family particularly or by name particularly, and if I have to name it in Ascii characters rather than being able to type in the Japanese name of the font, etc.)
Oh and being free software would be totally ideal.
Any ideas? (or am I the only one so particular about fonts... ? :o)
PS: I mean for the Windows desktop, although I can kick an old linux box awake if I need to. After that's solved, I also want the same font analysis capability for iPhone...
Of course I can pop open OpenOffice and type a few lines of any given font, and the windows control panel will tell me which few fonts it believes were designed for Japanese, but... testing in a word processor lies to you in funny ways, since fonts that don't contain Japanese will fall back on some other font to render Japanese characters, and there are plenty of fonts that have Japanese characters but don't have the right field set for Windows to claim they were 'designed for' Japanese.
So I'm looking for a font viewer (or other program that happens to have font examination built into it) that will ideally tell me everything there is to know about a font file, in particular whether it's a 'unicode' font in whatever sense VLC requires to work with Japanese subtitles, and of course to render out the complete character set for examination (or at least the Japanese character set), and of course, I want to know all the ways I can identify the font when I need to type in its name (in case I need to identify it by family particularly or by name particularly, and if I have to name it in Ascii characters rather than being able to type in the Japanese name of the font, etc.)
Oh and being free software would be totally ideal.
Any ideas? (or am I the only one so particular about fonts... ? :o)
PS: I mean for the Windows desktop, although I can kick an old linux box awake if I need to. After that's solved, I also want the same font analysis capability for iPhone...
Edited: 2013-01-31, 10:22 pm