Preview all your fonts at once with Flipping Typical

Depending on how much design work you've done, and what kind of software you're using, you probably have some idea of which fonts you have installed and what they look like. If you don't, there's a wonderfully simple Web app called Flipping Typical that gives you a WYSIWYG heads up of all of them at once.

You can type in whatever text you want to see and it will show you how it looks in each font, and the site updates in real time to reflect the changes. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to toggle on bold or italics to see what it would look like with a hint of formatting. It's smart enough to remember what font you were looking at between sessions, so if you close the page and come back later it will come back with that formatting still intact.

Most modern Web apps with font control have previews you can see before changing a font, but this app differs in showing what you have that can be used in offline programs too. I like it because it's good for brainstorming a quick font choice, something which can become increasingly difficult the larger your font library gets. For business cards, fliers, posters, and more, this can be a simple way to cut development time down.

Related: Fawnt makes font hunting easy, sexy

(via DownloadSquad and Lifehacker)

Flipping Typical shows you what fonts you have installed on your machine and lets you type in whatever you want to see, showing you how it looks in each font.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[Angmarr]

cool word 2007 also gives previews before you switch fonts.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

Yeah, but you gotta go through em one at a time. This does all of them at once!

[Angmarr]

true, true.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Okay, this is something I will be looking at for sure. Wonder if you could print it out as your own font book too. Hmm.

[lauder]

Most font utilities work only with only installed fonts.
Took me a long time to find The Font Thing which displays both installed fonts and lets you browse to any folder and displays font samples of non-installed fonts. This is great to browse all your font collections before having to first install it on your computer and then uninstall if when you don't like it.

Unfortunately, it's a beta version that has stopped development, but it's free.

The Font Thing
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

[hitex45]

It seems like something worth looking into.
Wanted an app that could give a helping hand in
reducing unused fonts and keeping them in a
separate file.
Can anyone make a suggestion.
hitex 45

[BnBGobo99]

This is very cool (to me anyway). Thank you for posting it, Josh.