FontRevealer is a simple application to explore Unicode font substitution behavior and diagnose troublesome font issues in macOS Cocoa applications.

Q&A

Your screenshot shows the first character to be from a Hiragino font; why don’t I see that on my system?

You might not have the Hiragino fonts on your system. In that case, some other font (perhaps Zapf Dingbats) will be used to render the ‘pointing hand’ character.

I select one character in the sample text, and two rows in the table are highlighted; what gives?

You have selected a Unicode composed character that is represented internally using multiple consecutive codes, each shown as a line in the table.

I select one row in the table, and an adjacent row gets highlighted too; what gives?

The rows representing a Unicode composed character are automatically selected as a group.

What are these strange arcs and lines I see in the sample text box?

If you’re seeing that sort of thing then you might have LaTeX fonts installed on your system. These can prevent proper rendering of Unicode characters due to incompatibilities with the Unicode character set used in macOS.

What can I do about these LaTeX fonts?

The LCIRCLE10, LCIRCLEW10, LINE10 and LINEW10 fonts (in the ‘LaTeX screen fonts’ suitcase file) are the usual culprits. You might be able to disable them without loss of functionality if you don’t need to render arcs, circles and lines in your LaTeX application.

Can I change the textured window appearance?

Why yes, yes you can. Control-click in the textured border area of the window and you’ll see a popup context menu. Select an alternate texture from the menu. (‘Aqua’ is the default macOS window appearance.)