Instant font info when browsing

February 4, 2009 10:48 AM

Has anyone heard of a firefox plugin or other software that displays current fontnames in your browser?

Wouldn't it be wonderful to hover your mouse over a typeface and instantly get info about it (when possible)? Does something like this exist?

posted by SurrenderMonkey to computers & internet (5 comments total)

LMGTFY...oh nevermind

link
posted by jckll at 10:55 AM on February 4

search is, of course, disabled for the moment, but there was a FPP recently about a website that identified most fonts on yr computer...
posted by dawson at 11:08 AM on February 4

here it is for what it's worth...
posted by dawson at 11:30 AM on February 4

The font finder addon allows you to highlight any text and then right click on it to get all of the info on how it's styled, etc.
posted by brenton at 1:38 PM on February 4

yea that font finder thing is ok, firebug does way way more than that, but it does do everything fontfinder does, and probably in a nicer way (ugh alert boxes? get out of here)

What are you doing by the way that you're so interested in the fonts? Any text you encounter on the internet will have to be one of a select few, known as the Websafe Fonts (that's a great link, btw) - because we don't download fonts (ttf files) and process them every time we get to a new page, the font must live on our computers already, so the only fonts "safe to use" are the ones already shipped with Windows and Macs.

If you see any font that isn't on that list it's probably an image (gif most likely) and you won't be able to get any font info from it, because it's an image (not text + font) and that info won't be available in the image. dig?
posted by qbxk at 4:25 PM on February 4