Select Character Info, and you can view all the font’s details in a dialog box, including a pleasing grid display that shows how the letter or symbol maps against standard typeface measurements. The contextual menu lets you copy the character’s underlying information as well as find similar glyph shapes and mark the character as a favorite. If the keyboard symbol has an X through it, the character can’t be typed with that layout otherwise, the combination of modifier keys and keycaps you need to press appears. The app shows a keyboard symbol plus a flag corresponding to your currently selected keyboard layout. The status bar shows all the technical details of the glyph: its decimal number, its Unicode code point, and its full human-readable description in Unicode. Hovering over offers two sets of choices: review information in a packed status bar at the bottom or Control-click for contextual goodies. ![]() OS X brought Font Book, which can reveal the entire set of characters in a style of a typeface-but not provide any organization, ease of access, or simple insertion into a document.īeyond scanning characters visually, you can retrieve information about them. Before Mac OS X, Apple’s Key Caps app let you select a font and see how characters appeared on a keyboard. Here, a Greek keyboard layout is in use.Īpple provides little help, and that’s why PopChar continues to flourish. PopChar recognizes your keyboard layout and lets you know how to type characters if they’re available. Many fonts include full Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets swash characters oodles of ligatures, or combinations of letters drawn together to avoid clashing stroke parts small caps, which are essentially “lowercase” capitals lining (“uppercase”) and old-style (“upper/lowercase”) numerals superscripts and subscripts and other symbols. (See “ How to make use of typographic refinement in Pages and other macOS software.”)įonts hide many extras. You either need to use a design program with a view-all-characters option-like Adobe InDesign’s Glyphs viewer-or use the Typography option in the Fonts palette, accessible within Pages and many other apps. (A font here is a set of characters, or glyphs, in a given typeface and style packed into a font file.) Many typographic extras are hidden. The status bar at bottom shows you detailed information, including how to type it (if available) and what format to insert it in.Įven when adding Shift and/or Option, pressing keyboard keys only reveals a fraction of modern fonts’ characters. PopChar’s main view lets you select a font and then view its entire set of character organized in various ways. ![]() You can adjust a given font’s viewing size individually if the default is too large or too small. And browse your installed typefaces to find the right fit for what you’re designing or producing. Click to insert it as plain text, rich text (at a specified size, even), or HTML. ![]() Hover over a letter to get more information. Examine the repertoire available in the font. When you click in a preferred corner of the screen, the utility pops out, giving you easy access to hundreds to tens of thousands of characters in a given font in its palette-like window. (Or even Ready, Set, Go!)įrom its earliest days, PopChar popped. Released in 1987 for System 5 and revamped as PopChar X for Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002, many current users weren’t born when some of us relied on PopChar as a critical part of our daily workflow in PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and InDesign. Few pieces of Mac software can claim the history of PopChar, a utility that makes it a click and a hover to see the appearance of individual characters in fonts installed on your Mac.
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