So just earlier today I was trying to find a font that had the Rx symbol (℞) as a proper character and, while I found a few relatively quickly, I realized that scrolling through the preview lists could easily become a timesink.
Does anybody know of a way to find or filter fonts that have specific glyphs? For example, if I needed a font to have the dollar sign, prescription symbol, and copyright mark, is there a better option than scrolling through the preview menu across my whole library? I’m using Suitcase Fusion and as far as I can tell that’s not a feature it has, and my Google-Fu must be off today because I’m not getting any good results on my searches.
You could just go to one of the font retail sites and where you get the option to type in your own sample text, simply type keystroke for the glyph you want, ie alt-R on a Mac for the registered trademark symbol.
Are you wanting to search for specific characters in fonts that are already installed on your computer? Are you using a Macintosh?
If so, yes, there’s a way to do it. I’m running Catalina. If you’re running another MacOS, your results might differ.
Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences
Click the keyboard icon then click the keyboard tab.
Click the check box that says, “Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar.”
Close the System Preferences box
A new icon should appear in the upper right corner of your Mac’s menu bar. It looks sort of like a little calendar with an X on it. Click it. A small dropdown menu will appear. Select “Choose emojies & symbols”
A new window will appear with three columns (see image below). The first column lets you choose various categories of font glyphs to search. The second column shows the glyphs you have available within that category. The third column has a search field above it. Type or paste any character into that field, and the results in the column will show if and in which font on your computer it’s available. For example, I pasted in the ℞ symbol. It tells me that the symbols reside in eight fonts installed on my computer — for example, Lucida Grande Bold.
Yeah that’s exactly the kind of tool I was hoping to find. Unfortunately I’m running a PC as my primary work computer - I’m more familiar/comfortable with the Windows interfaces. I do have an old mac as a backup that has some of the library I have, and that’ll help with a lot of the basic fonts, since most of what I’d need is just identifying them. That is a very, very handy tool though, and if there’s no comparable PC option it’s a new and very solid point in the IOS corner for me.
