Determine fonts used to render text.

Fontwhich is a commandline tool that used pango to determine which default fonts would be used to render some text, or which font would be used for a particular language script.

Fontwhich

Fontwhich is a small CLI tool that uses pango to show which default fonts are used to render some text.

It should work on any Linux distro with the Cairo and Pango libraries: it requires the fonts to be available but not a graphical session.

Usage

$ fontwhich --version

0.2

$ fontwhich --help

fontwhich

Usage: fontwhich [--version] [-f|--font FONT] [-l|--lang LANG] [-b|--utf8] 
                 [-u|--unicode] [TEXT]

  Describes the fonts used to render text with pango

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  --version                Show version
  -f,--font FONT           Base font [default: Sans]
  -l,--lang LANG           Language code
  -b,--utf8                Output UTF-8 hex codes
  -u,--unicode             Output Unicode data

$ fontwhich Hello 🌍 World 世界

'Hello ' : Noto Sans
'🌍' : Noto Color Emoji
' World ' : Noto Sans
'世界' : Noto Sans CJK JP

$ fontwhich -f Serif "こんにちは 😀 世界"

'こんにちは ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'😀' : Noto Color Emoji
' ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'世界' : Noto Serif CJK JP

$ fontwhich -l ja

Primary font for ja is: "Noto Sans CJK JP"

$ fontwhich --utf8 🌳

4 bytes;
'🌳' [f0 9f 8c b3] : Noto Color Emoji

$ fontwhich --unicode αβ१२

10 bytes; 2 pango items
'αβ' : Noto Sans
α <U+03B1>: GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA [Greek]
β <U+03B2>: GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA [Greek]
'१२' : Noto Sans Devanagari
१ <U+0967>: DEVANAGARI DIGIT ONE [Devanagari]
२ <U+0968>: DEVANAGARI DIGIT TWO [Devanagari]

One can use both options together:

$ fontwhich --utf8 🍊 --unicode

4 bytes;
'🍊' [f0 9f 8d 8a] : Noto Color Emoji
🍊 <U+1F34A>: TANGERINE [Common]

Building and installation

On Fedora:

$ cabal-rpm builddep
$ cabal install

There is a copr repo: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/petersen/fontwhich/

Misc

Code assisted with Gemini 3.1.

The tool is related conceptually to https://github.com/sudipshil9862/whichfont (C codebase).

Collaborate

The code is distributed under GPLv3+.

Repository: https://github.com/juhp/fontwhich.