Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen

General typography

• Thinking With Type
• Typographica
• Typophile forums
• I love typography
• Typographer.org
• Cameron Moll on Typography
• Microsoft Typography
• TypeNeu

Typography and markup

• Unicode home page
• Croatian and other common UTF-8 entities
• ASCII characters
• HTML color names

Advanced typography for the screen

• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
• sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement
• Multi color sIFR
• CSS Image replacement summary
• JavaScript Image replacement
• The difference between Mac and PC font rendering

1. Edit, enter or paste sample text in the textarea. The text is automatically applied to preview pane as you type. See Lorem ipsum generator.
2. Choose your typeface from dropdown menu or specify your own. However, keep in mind that there’s a possibility that not everyone have that same font on their systems. If you are choosing font for broad range of visitors, it’s a good idea to stick with those from the safe list.
3. Set parameters. Values are applied as you type/select if the syntax is correct and values you enter are recognized. There’s no submit buttons. This way you preview as you type.
4. The base font size of the preview pane is 10px. Read the explanation.
5. If you’d like to copy settings to another column, just hit the corresponding button, i.e. button '1' of the current column will copy current column’s settings to column No. 1. and so on.
6. If you enabled cookies in your browser, the last applied settings will be automatically stored on your computer and loaded next time you visit this page.
7. When you run out of ideas, check the stats for inspiration.

Browsers supported*

• Mozilla Firefox Win/Mac/Linux 1.0+
• Mozilla Camino 0.8+**
• Opera Win/Mac 8.0+**
• Safari 2.0+
• Omniweb 5.1.1.**
• Internet Explorer Win 5.5/6.0/7.0**

JavaScript

In order to use the application, please turn JavaScript on.

Cookies

If you’d like to see settings from your last visit next time you come around, just enable cookies.

Firefox extensions

Due to variety of extensions for Firefox available, some extensions could break some Typetester’s functions. Please do report troubles. If possible, provide a list of installed extensions.

* Even though the application should work on any system which allows installation of the listed browsers, it's advisable not to run it on a system with processor 1Ghz or lower.
** Some advanced functionality (like color-picker or client system font-list) might be missing in some browsers. However, all settings can be adjusted respectively.

What is Typetester?

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

Technical details

Typetester’s code structure is XHTML, styled with the finest CSS and driven by the JavaScript for manipulating DOM structures. Typetester will not work without JavaScript enabled.

Credits

• web.burza
• unpljugged
• mi3dot.org

Contact

We’d like to hear what you think about Typetester. Send message.