Choosing the right font for a document or graphic project can make a huge difference to the results, but the poor viewers in Windows and many applications make it difficult to find the font you need.

PrintMyFonts can help by displaying any or all of your fonts, enabling at-a-glance comparisons, and exporting the results as images or documents.

Launch the program and it immediately presents a list containing the words “Example Text” in each of your fonts. You can change this to whatever you like, perhaps a company name to see how it would look on a logo, as well as adjusting the text size, style, background and foreground colours.

PrintMyFonts can also include the contents of font files. Just point the program at a folder, or specific TTF/ OTF/ FON/ FNT/ FOT/ TTC/ MMM/ PFM files to see those as well.

Your list will probably contain hundreds of fonts, way too many to compare side-by-side, but PrintMyFonts doesn’t have to display them all. A Filter box enables restricting the list by keyword, so for example entering “hand” on our PC cut the numbers from 330 to just 4 handwriting fonts.

Filter your fonts and choose your own example text

Alternatively, you can scroll down the list and Ctrl+click to select interesting fonts, then right-click and “Remove not selected” to get rid of everything else.

By now you’ll be able to clearly compare any remaining fonts, but if you’d like to get someone else’s opinion, it’s also possible to export and share the list.

The most reliable method is probably to save the list as a PNG, BMP or JPG image, ready for emailing to anyone interested.

You could also send the list to your printer. Conveniently, the printed page can have separate font sizes, foreground and background colours to the display and image versions.

There are also options to export the list to RTF or HTML, but keep in mind that this doesn’t include or embed the fonts themselves. If someone opens your document and doesn’t have access to some of the source fonts, these won’t be displayed correctly.

There are lots of font viewers around, but PrintMyFonts stands out for its straightforward interface, range of features and configurability (being portable and no-strings free is handy, too). Check it out.

PrintMyFonts is a free application for Windows XP and later.