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As an enthusiast of languages and writing systems here's a problem I often run into:

I have many fonts installed and many support several or many writing systems (scripts) for various languages. (My OS is Windows 7)

Sometimes I want to know exactly which subset of the fonts I have installed support a particular writing system, or a particular character.

How can I get a list of the fonts on my system for a string / a character / a language / a writing system?

I'd accept a website that can check, a tool already included in Windows 7, a tool I need to download, etc.

(I realize some fonts might contain the characters but lack enough data to render words correctly. I'm OK with this and similar limitations.)

2 Answers 2

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I found an old tool from 2007 that has this feature, somewhat hidden:

CharMapEx can be downloaded from a post in the blog "Internationalization Cookbook".

  1. First you will need to find the Unicode hex code of the character, or beginning of the Unicode script range.
    This doesn't seem to be included in the tool but one way to find it is to do a Google search including the character you're looking for plus the keyword "fileformat". The fileformat.info site will give you the code.

  2. Use the toolbar of CharMapEx to go to the range.

  3. Whether the default loaded font includes the character or not there will be a box for your character. If the character is not included the box will be red but may still have the character rendered in a fallback font.

  4. Right-click on the box for your character, even if it just has a square box or question mark, etc. You will see a pop-up menu.

  5. Select "Find font containing glyph" from the popup menu.

  6. A dialog will now open containing a list of the names of all your locally installed fonts which contain a glyph for this character. You can't copy and paste the list unfortunately but you can click on any item and the display will be updated with that font.

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For list of all installed fonts in windows you ca use command:

reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts"

To list only truetype fonts you can use something like:

reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts"|findstr TrueType

If you want to see all nontruetype fonts use findstr on this way:

...|findstr -v TrueType 
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  • Getting a complete list of fonts is trivially easy. Getting a list of fonts that support the Khmer script or the character (without falling back to another font since that means dozens or hundreds of dupes) is not easy. Apologies if my question is not clear, there's always a trade off between including enough info to discourage inaccurate answers and ending up with with a tl;dr )-: Jan 18, 2015 at 7:13
  • @hippietrail, check if this can help you: stackoverflow.com/questions/1439551/… Jan 18, 2015 at 7:17
  • That's actually asking the reverse question. I want a list of fonts that support a script or char, the question is about getting a list of characters that a font supports. You could of course do this for every font installed, but I want a tool that iterates through all the fonts for me so I don't have to do the labour - that's what computers are for (-: Jan 18, 2015 at 7:25
  • Here I find few programs which check for particular symbol in font: stackoverflow.com/questions/103725/… Is this you search for? Jan 18, 2015 at 7:30
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    I saw this tool, but my understanding was you want to do the task from command line :) Jan 18, 2015 at 8:16

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