Operating system: Windows 7 or later. (Windows XP SP3 may also work.)
Pre-requisities: .NET Framework 3.5, 4.0 or 4.5. Client Profile version is OK. Installer will offer to download .NET Framework if it is missing.
Fontitin works with all installed TrueType and OpenType fonts. It does not require any specific font. To view all available characters, it is recommended to install some of the following large fonts. These fonts support a wide range of Unicode characters, making them useful for learning about new letters, symbols and so on.
The LastResort font is special in that it supports all Unicode characters. When looking for characters that don't appear in any font, Fontitin ignores LastResort even if it's installed.
Fontitin supports all TrueType and OpenType fonts installed on Windows. Supported filetypes are .TTF and .OTF, including both TrueType and PostScript (CFF) outlines. To view a new font, install it on Windows first.
Symbol fonts, such as Wingdings, are supported. These fonts tend to have their symbols duplicated in 2 areas: 00-FF and the Private Use Area (F000–).
Bitmap and non-TrueType vector fonts are unsupported. Unsupported vector fonts include Windows 2.0 fonts Modern, Roman and Script.
On Windows, it's possible to install fonts that applications can't use. Rarely, a font family may come with two "competing" styles, such as two different Normal styles, or both Oblique and Italic. In this case, only one of the styles is visible to applications. Fontitin ignores such installed but unsupported variants. If you have many style of the same font family installed, but Fontitin and other applications refuse to display them all, this could be the explanation.
Fontitin uses your web browser for displaying the characters. Each font looks the way it will look on a web site. Rarely, a font may not be browser compatible. If this happens you will see the closest matching font. We have noticed that font families with non-standard properties, such as weight 250, may experience this issue.
Fontitin supports all characters that have a Unicode value.
A few control characters, which are normally invisible, are not always displayable. They include 00 [NUL], 09 [HT], 0A [LF], 0D [CR] and AD [SHY]. In most fonts, these characters are either empty spaces or totally missing. SHY, the soft hyphen, is usually hidden, but it displays as a hyphen when a word is hyphenated. Fontitin cannot show these characters due to limitations of HTML. If a visually identical character occurs in another position of the same font, that is displayed instead. Thus, if the regular hyphen and the soft hyphen are identical in the font, you will see a hyphen displayed for SHY, but not if they're different.
Fontitin supports all characters but not all glyphs. A font may contain several glyphs for one Unicode character. The glyphs may be used via advanced OpenType features, which Fontitin doesn't support. Generally speaking, advanced OpenType support is lacking both on the web and in most applications.