Opcion Font Viewer & Fonts

Oh goodie, it’s obsession time.

Now this is normally Jools area of expertise but this came from the “cool things you can do with Java” list.

To checkout a font and see what it would look like applied to your name/logo/whatever, and then keep track of which fonts best suit the job, download a copy of Opcion Font Viewer. Opcion allows you to view both installed (the stuff in your windows\font directory) and uninstalled fonts in different views depending on your needs. It’s written in Java, so Opcion will work on all platforms that the Java Runtime Environment supports (which includes Windows, Mac, Solaris & Linux).

Opcion Font Viewer has a default view that allows you to view one font at a time, and a list view which allows you to view multiple fonts at a time (?). By clicking on fonts you like in the list view you are adding fonts to a favourites list that Opcion keeps for you. The list can then be saved for future reference or used in finding out the file names of fonts you wish to install. All in all quite handy.

Now what good is a fontviewer without a few free fonts. TypeNow offers a very cool selection of free themed fonts from your favorite movies, television shows, musicians, video games, and more. The selection offered is pretty large, offering over 300 free fonts in all. I still love Nightmare before Christmas.

And to round the font utilities off for today, Neuber Software’s FontRenamer renames truetype font files (*.ttf) to the real name of the typefaces.

Simply select a folder of font files and click Rename button. So you get Arial bold italic.ttf instead of arialbi.ttf and Brush Script.ttf instead of brushscn.ttf. Gibberish begone (well not quite but its a hell of a lot better than it was).