FontViewOK Portable

Windows is full of fonts, and many programs have their own fonts, too. Keeping track of all those typefaces can be a challenge, especially if you like to use different fonts for various special needs. FontViewOK Portable is portable freeware that displays your fonts in twin identical views, allowing quick side-by-side comparisons. It includes useful features that set it apart from the competition, such as the ability to access any folder containing fonts, a print preview feature, and the ability to manage Windows fonts.

FontViewOK is completely portable, so it runs without having to be installed. It features nearly identical, side-by-side windows displaying all the fonts in the selected folder, which by default is Installed System Fonts, though we could browse to other locations via the From-Folder button as well as Refresh the view. The toolbar also has a button labeled Coffee for making small donations to the freeware's developer. Each of the two panes shows the font size and name and displays text entered in all of the available fonts and styles. Each pane also has buttons for italics, bold, underline, and other common text features. The left-side panel has a check box labeled Be a Clone, which enters your text in both entry fields, though you can still select different fonts. An extra, optional toolbar called the I-Net Toolbar let us search for fonts similar to the one we'd selected through Surfok.de, though it's in German. We could remove the toolbar from the View menu. There's no help file because one really isn't needed; this tool is quite basic in operation, and quite useful, too.

We tried a variety of different fonts, some of which we'd swear we never saw before. Unlike some similar tools, FontViewOK Portable let us browse to specific folders containing fonts. Under the Extras menu, we clicked Manage Windows Fonts. FontViewOK opened the Control Panel's Fonts page. The Print Preview is another useful extra. But this simple tool's main trick is to show what your text will look like in various fonts. For that, it's a top choice.