Apple - View all a fonts characters app?
Font Book does in fact have a view that displays all glyphs provided by a font — just select Preview - Repertoire on the menu bar:
You can also get a preview of a font using Quick Look: select a font file (from /Library/Fonts) and press space.
I use character maps heavily and decides to make one which you access from anywhere using a web interface and requires no installation.
Features
- Select your own font file
- Provides font and character information
- Character copy-able
- Supports TTF/OTF
- Supports Icon fonts
- Smooth interface
- No installation necessary
- No server upload necessary
Screenshot
I guess you're on Lion - right ?
Because in Snow-Leopard you could get that by showing the "character viewer" from the inputs menu or launching directly /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app
as described here and choosing "Glyph" view.
Check out the new smilies (now part of the Unicode standard ;) in the DejaVu font
But if you still got access to a Snow-Leopard installation you can copy the CharacterPalette.app from /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app
and it will run on Lion, I would not recommend replacing the Lion version, but rather keeping the Snow-Leopard CharacterPalette as separate app - why did Apple have to make it worse in the first place ?!
As you can drag & drop glyphs from the Snow-Leopard Character Palette but not from the new Lion Font Book...
This idea was inspired by Is it possible to use the character map as a standalone app?