Filter fonts by language support
Some fonts may not support all the characters you need. If you don’t want to see these font you can hide them from your overview.
General language filters
The search filters allow you to filter fonts that support a specific language.
- Click on the search field
- Choose the 文A button for language filter options
- Select one of the displayed languages
The top of the list shows the language(s) you’ve setup as default macOS language. Once a language is selected Typeface will only display fonts that support the chosen language. You can enable multiple language options if you’re looking for fonts that need to support multiple languages.
Hide fonts that are missing specific glyphs
If you want to be more specific about which characters you need you can use the option (previously ). When enabled this option hides all fonts that don’t contain some of the characters you want to preview.
Click the Pr button in the toolbar to change the preview text and enter the characters you need, for example “Tipografía Fantástica”. You can also on a preview and choose > to show a pangram of common characters in a specific script.
You may notice that some of your fonts are not able to display all the characters of your preview. These missing glyphs will be replaced by greyed-out alternatives. If the full preview is greyed-out that means that that particular font cannot display any of the entered characters.
To hide these fonts follow these steps:
- Click on the search field
- Choose the 文A button for language filter options
- Enable
Once enabled all fonts that cannot display some of the previewed characters will be hidden. For example: if a font doesn’t contain glyphs for the í or á in Tipografía Fantástica it will not be shown in the grid.
Note that the app needs to load all fonts in order to check their character support, so if you have many fonts it may slow down app launch. You can disable the setting again when you don’t need it. This filter is persistent and will stay enabled when you close and reopen the app.
Inspecting language and character support
If you’ve found some font candidates you’d like to use in your design it is helpful to know what characters and languages they support. You can double click on a font to view font details, then choose the Info detail tab to view a list of languages that are supported by the font.
While this list gives you a useful first impression of the supported languages, it may not be an exact and exhaustive list. Which characters are used by a certain language can be ambiguous, so a language may show up as supported while a font does not technically contain all characters. For example there are tens of thousands of kanji, but a font does not have to support all of them to support Japanese.
If you’re looking for Latin character support you can also view the Characters text layout. Choose the Text detail tab and select the Characters template at the bottom of the window. This will give you a quick overview of the accented characters that are available and will be more precise than a language list. Characters that are not available will be displayed in grey.
You can create your own text templates if you’d like to make a custom overview of character support.