Font Xplorer

Moon Software’s Font Xplorer is a freeware font manager that makes it easy to view, print, sample, and handle the many fonts installed on your PC — and take it from us, there are more fonts in your system than you might realize. Font Xplorer’s text compare mode makes it easy to pick just the right font, and it can also search your system to find duplicate fonts that you can remove to reclaim disk space and keep your Windows waistline trim. This tool can load, unload, install, and uninstall fonts by folder, search for uninstalled fonts, show summaries of selected fonts, and create and print font sample sheets. Font Xplorer can also rename fonts so that you can use their full name.

Font Xplorer’s user interface is box-standard Windows in style, with a menu bar and toolbar, but the main window is tall and narrow, which saves space. We could customize many aspects of Font Xplorer’s interface and controls from the View menu as well as icons on the toolbar. The main window displayed samples of all our fonts in each font’s name as soon as we opened the program. We could scroll and click any font to call up its character map, and drag the maps to resize them — very handy since some fonts and characters are hard to see when rendered in such a tiny view. We could select and copy any symbol as text, rich text, or a vector image file and paste it into documents. A drop-down menu let us view fonts in different scripts, such as Western, Cyrillic, and Greek.

The duplicate font finder found none in our system, nor any uninstalled fonts. Font Xplorer includes a Repair Wizard that can remove invalid font references from the Windows registry, and optionally remove valid references to fonts only installed on a removable drive. It worked quickly and caused no issues in our system. Font Xplorer can also restore the default “magic” folder setting from new Windows installations, which displays all fonts. The Help file may not open in 64-bit Windows, but that’s not this fine tool’s fault.