Inspire Yourself

Font Spy shows:

• Either the selected glyph.
• Or anything you type as text.

No Font Installation (!)

W H A A A T ?!

YES! Just drop TTFs or OTFs into a folder called
“_FontSpyFonts”
and they’ll magically appear in the Font Spy.

• Reload with one click, no app restart necessary.

Here’s an example for a folder structure:

Please Note: Mentioned »Glyphs« folder is found in Library > Application Support. Not in the Glyphs App.

Variable Font Sliders

This is a biggie! Really big!

• Every font which has the Variable font indicator provides the sliders to be tweaked.
• Those are actual (!) variable fonts.
• You can even test your variable fonts without any browser or external apps. Not even Indesign supports that out of the box currently. OMG! 😱

Font Info

Every font has a little button which opens another panel with nifty information about that font:

• Variation sliders (If it’s a variable font).
• Font name, which will dynamically adjust when you change the sliders.
• Copyright info. We respect and honor the designers who inspire us.
• Italic angle in degrees.
• Glyphs count.
• Font UPM.
• Supported Languages (beta).
• typographic features

Customize your List

This list is the main part of Font Spy. Here you see all the fonts you want to see.
Customize it as your heart desires:

• Drag-n-drop-rearranging to compare fonts directly.
• Resize the fonts.
• Show/hide the font names.
• Select any font to see it with inverted colors.

Support for Any Script

Font Spy supports any script you want.

All you need to do is to put the supporting fonts into a subfolder with that script’s name. Lowercased. Done. Font Spy takes care of the auto-recognition.

• If you add a subfolder “none”, all glyphs without a script will trigger to show the fonts from this folder.

Real Text

Font Spy presents real text to you.

The fonts behave like in a text editor, they will have kerning, all default OpenType-features like ligatures and proper mark positioning.

Normalise x-Heights

Simple but super effective:
Activate this and all fonts get rescaled to have the same x-Height as the first font in list.

Remember that you can drag and drop any font to be the first item in order to be the scale master.

Fallback Glyph

When your selected glyph is suffixed
(for example “a.calt01”)
and any of the shown fonts doesn’t have a glyph with this name, Font Spy attempts to present the base glyph
(for example “a”)
instead.

This means that you can easily see when a font actually includes a glyph with this name or is lacking certain glyphs.

• Base glyph fallbacks will be grey to indicate that it’s not exactly the glyph you asked for. But fair enough.
• Missing glyph fallbacks will be a system font and in a very light color.

Crossbar

For comparing relations between fonts and glyphs you get several different measurement tools.

• 1:A thin crossbar to quickly compare alignments. It’s also italicised to the font’s angle.
  Activate with Cmd and moving the mouse.
• 2:A wide crossbar which you can set the width of. Horizontally and vertically.
  Activate with Shift and moving the mouse.
  It’s auto-adjusted to the normalized x-Height and makes it easy to quickly compare stem widhts within one ore many fonts.
• 3: Rectangles to show words’, glyphs’ and line’ bounds.
  Activate with Opt and moving the mouse.
• 4: Vertical font metrics. Ascenders, descenders, x-Height, cap-Height of the font. (For variable fonts this feature is in beta status.)

Window Style

Font Spy acts as a floating window which is always on top.

Hence you can work on your design without the need to re-enable the window when you need it.

• You can resize it to be as big or small as you want.
• Font Spy remembers its position when you open it later.
• It supports Dark Mode and all those fancy spor colors.

Show Font in Finder

Click this button and the chosen font will magically opened in the finder.

That’s also a quick way to access the Font Spy fonts folder.