17
Super modern bash script.
fontviewer.sh > /tmp/viewfont.html && xdg-open /tmp/viewfont.html
I see you are an experienced Linux user.
Complaining that something doesn't exist on Linux, instead of asking for advice in the title -
Triggers people who want to help and people who want to correct you.
turns out stackoverflow isn't dead
It's not you, the web has forgotten how to be searched.
Not sure if it counts, but gnome-font-viewer might fit the bill.
You can probably run something like gnome-font-viewer /usr/share/fonts/open-sans/OpenSans-Regular.ttf and it should show you the font, although I haven't verified that myself.
Here are it's dependencies:
$ dnf repoquery --requires gnome-font-viewer
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
libadwaita-1.so.0()(64bit)
libadwaita-1.so.0(LIBADWAITA_1_0)(64bit)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libcairo.so.2()(64bit)
libfontconfig.so.1()(64bit)
libfreetype.so.6()(64bit)
libfribidi.so.0()(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1()(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1(GCC_3.0)(64bit)
libgcc_s.so.1(GCC_3.3.1)(64bit)
libgio-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libglib-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgobject-2.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgraphene-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
libgtk-4.so.1()(64bit)
libharfbuzz.so.0()(64bit)
libm.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
libpango-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0()(64bit)
rtld(GNU_HASH)
It does also let you view fonts installed on your system, but I don't see why that should be a deal-breaker.
There is also the display command, provided by ImageMagick. My understanding is that it only supports X11, but it should work just fine under XWayland.
These types of apps became fairly irrelevant with the advent of Web Fonts and sites that already do all of this.
There's Fontbase, Gnome's Font Manager, KDE's Font Viewer and FontForge that are still maintained.
The fact that you're asking for whatever tool to not use something like QT or GTK is asking for the moon here. These types of applications you describe are generally packaged with a DE for this very use. I don't think there's a real use-case for someone to develop this independent of any DE, honestly. That's what they're most useful for.
These types of apps became fairly irrelevant with the advent of Web Fonts and sites that already do all of this.
That’s my point. All of those stupid modern things do not solve my issue of just double-clicking a local ttf file in my file manager to see some text rendered in that font. That is literally all I want to do.
The fact that you’re asking for whatever tool to not use something like QT or GTK
I don’t really care what graphics toolkit is used. I just don’t want something that is heavily interconnected with any type of desktop environment due to not wanting to install a metric shit-ton of dependencies 😉
those stupid modern things
As far as I know, GNOME and KDE have had font viewers since time immemorial.
If the requirement is "few dependencies that I don't already have" then we need to know something about what dependencies you already have and what constitutes too many. As far as I can see, gnome-font-viewer's one GNOME-specific dependency is libadwaita.
As far as I know, GNOME and KDE have had font viewers since time immemorial.
I was talking specifically about web fonts and web font websites which help me not the slightest with my use case.
Oh, ok.
So, what dependencies do the DE font viewers actually pull in? How much space does that take up? What are the limits?
These types of apps became fairly irrelevant with the advent of Web Fonts and sites that already do all of this.
Lol no, i have my browsers fonts limited on purpose, to avoid visual overload.
You are the minutiae of users.
And?
And your user pattern doesn't make my point any less correct or relevant. In fact... Not sure why you even commented in the fashion you chose to.
What features do you need? Just render a string with a given font and that’s it? Or something more advanced?
Ideally something that allows me to see the characters in a table, sorted by character blocks, like in the LibreOffice “Insert Special Characters” dialog, so that I’m not limited to some predefined text but being able to see all characters.
KCharSelect maybe?
KCharSelect
It just installs kcharselect … and figuratively half of KDE :)
There seems to be a Flatpak available I’ll check out later when I have time to install hundreds of megabyte of depending other KDE-specific Flatpaks …
The TDE version of kcharselect should do much the same stuff with fewer deps, if a suitable package exists for your distro.
Sounds like you already know the real solution: use KDE
It isn't a dedicated font viewer, but I've used ImageMagick's display utility to preview fonts.
ImageMagick really is a Swiss Army Knife of usefulness …
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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