this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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A modern and simple font (pre)viewing application seems to be an impossible thing … (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 hour ago by Dirk@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 :)

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[–] siha@feddit.uk 5 points 1 hour 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.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 hour ago

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

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

These types of apps became fairly irrelevant with the advent of Web Fonts and sites that already do all of this.

There's Fontbase, Gnome's Font Manager, KDE's Font Viewer and FontForge that are still maintained.

The fact that you're asking for whatever tool to not use something like QT or GTK is asking for the moon here. These types of applications you describe are generally packaged with a DE for this very use. I don't think there's a real use-case for someone to develop this independent of any DE, honestly. That's what they're most useful for.

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 58 minutes ago)

These types of apps became fairly irrelevant with the advent of Web Fonts and sites that already do all of this.

That’s my point. All of those stupid modern things do not solve my issue of just double-clicking a local ttf file in my file manager to see some text rendered in that font. That is literally all I want to do.

The fact that you’re asking for whatever tool to not use something like QT or GTK

I don’t really care what graphics toolkit is used. I just don’t want something that is heavily interconnected with any type of desktop environment due to not wanting to install a metric shit-ton of dependencies 😉