Font Preview

Quick Look for fonts on macOS. Open source, October 2026.

Press Space on a font file in Finder and macOS shows one line of sample text, or, for a WOFF2, a blank icon. To actually see a font you had to install it. Font Preview is a Quick Look extension that shows the whole font straight from the file: the family set in itself, every size, the character set and every glyph.

GitHub Download

Downloads

    Playing on its own. Click inside the window to take over.

    A folder of fonts in Finder: a variable WOFF2, TrueType, a Devanagari face. None of them installed.

    Why I built it

    I kept running into the same thing myself: a folder of downloaded fonts, and no quick way to see what any of them looked like. Font Book wants to install them first, and a web font previews as a blank icon.

    Quick Look was already the right place: select, Space, look, move on. It just needed to understand fonts.

    What it shows

    1. The family name set in the font itself, with its format, glyph count, version, designer and file size.
    2. Sample text from 72 points down to 12.
    3. The character set, and every glyph in a grid.
    4. A menu of faces for collections and variable fonts.
    5. A light and dark switch.

    It previews TrueType, OpenType, collections (.ttc, .otc), Mac suitcases (.dfont), and WOFF and WOFF2 web fonts. It needs macOS 14 or later, and uses about 20 MB of memory and no CPU while a preview sits open.

    Decisions

    Open on Regular, not Thin.
    Variable fonts and collections list their faces in file order, which often starts with the thinnest. The preview opens on Regular, the face you’re most likely judging, and a menu in the corner switches between the rest.
    Show what the font has, nothing it doesn’t.
    The character set only lists characters the font contains, so a gap tells you something real about the font.
    Light and dark, inside the window.
    A face can look right on white and fall apart on black. One switch checks both, without touching the system appearance.
    Ask for nothing.
    No Full Disk Access, no Accessibility, no screen recording. The preview runs in Apple’s sandbox, reads only the file you pressed Space on, and has no network access. The app checks GitHub for updates once a day and refuses any update whose signature doesn’t match.

    Install

    Run this in Terminal. It downloads the latest release, copies Font Preview to Applications and turns the Quick Look extension on.

    curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emSoumik/font-preview/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

    Or download the DMG and drag it into Applications. The README explains every permission macOS asks for, and has a prompt to let a coding agent install it for you.

    Font Preview is free and open source under the MIT license, written in Swift. Source, issues and releases are on GitHub.