PopChar

Looking for a specific character among hundreds of fonts with hundreds of characters each may become a fastidious task that PopChar can help you overcome.

This useful utility displays a list of all the fonts installed on your PC as well as all the characters included in the selected font. What is more, it offers you filters and powerful search engines to help you locate that character you’re looking for in no time.

Instead of memorizing elusive codes or key combinations, you can use PopChar to find and select specific characters in the font of your choice. One option is to choose the font and then filter its characters by type, such as digits, numbers, diacritical, Latin, etc. You can also select a character and ask the program to list all the fonts that have a similar one. A third option will let you select a character and search for all other characters that share a similar shape – this is especially useful when trying to locate a specific ideogram, symbol, dingbat, etc. You can also set your favorites for each font, which will help you to locate at a glance those characters you use more often.

Apart from the information about the selected character that appears at the bottom bar of the interface (key combination, Unicode code, etc.), when you point to a certain character, ligature, ideogram, etc., you’ll be presented with an information about its code number, its name, and even its translation into English in the case of Mandarin characters. You can use this information to search for characters in foreign or non-Latin fonts. If you right-click on the character, a context menu will pop up to help you insert that character in various ways – as the character itself, as HTML code, and as Unicode Decimal or Hex. Alternatively, you can copy the character name, if that’s what you need.

Apart from its most obvious functionality – i.e., locating and inserting a given character in the document or webpage you’re working on –, PopChar can also be of interest for font designers. The program not only offers a magnifier view of the selected character that allows you to take a closer look at it, but it also provides you with a larger and more designer-oriented view when you select it to search for other characters with a similar shape.

Not being a free tool, and given the amount of exotic characters that the average user may need to use during a given period of time, I’d say that PopChar is better suited to professionals working in the publishing industry and the font design industry. However, anyone interested in knowing more about fonts, their names, codes, meanings, etc., may also find this tool fascinating.