Font Finder for Windows

Font Finder is a free extension for Firefox that extracts and displays CSS text information from Web pages. It's a valuable tool for Web designers and developers who need to determine or test CSS data for single elements up to paragraph size. It analyzes data and saves it to the clipboard. It can disable font families for entire pages to test degradation for cross-platform support. It also enables in-line adjustment of any font option in an active element.

Font Finder installs just like any Firefox extension. We opened the Firefox add-on manager, but Font Finder has only two options: check boxes to show Font Finder in the status bar or context menus, both selected by default. Don't be fooled, though; Font Finder extracts a lot of information, as we discovered when we highlighted a paragraph of text on a random Web site. We right-clicked the highlighted area and selected "Analyze selection" from Font Finder's menu. The program quickly returned a JavaScript pop-up displaying detailed information on the color, font, spacing, decoration, transformation, and element details of the selected text. Next we clicked the menu item labeled "Copy elements," which let us choose to copy the element's hex color, font family, font size, ID, class, or all of that data. A similar menu entry let us adjust font family, size, color, and variants as well as line height and letter and word spacing. Finally, we could click "Disable font (entire DOM)" or "Replace font (entire DOM)" to specify a new font via a JavaScript pop-up. Obviously, some of these options only apply to pages you can modify, though Font Finder seemed capable of extracting CSS text data from any applicable site.

Web designers at every level can make good use of Font Finder. It's especially handy as a browser add-on since it lets you see a lot of information about fonts and styles you encounter while surfing and save it quickly and easily for possible use in your own pages.