Use AppleScript to Turn Your Fonts Folder into a Mini Application

The bare bones font panel built into OS X has never inspired me:

default-font.png

If you don’t know the font you want, there aren’t a lot of options for you to experiment with here. Fortunately, Leopard provides a better way to preview your fonts.

toolbar-buttons.jpg

Open a Finder window and navigate to your Fonts folder (find it in ~/Library/Fonts). Now switch to ‘Flow View’ (select the forth button on the toolbar selector or press Cmd + 4) to see your fonts in the revolving carousel. As you scroll through your fonts you’ll see a capital ‘A’ and a lower case ‘g’ displayed representing the font set. To see the whole set, press the space bar to QuickLook the font.

fonts-flowview.jpg

Here is an AppleScript to automate the process of opening the Fonts folder and setting it to Flow View. It also hides the toolbar:

tell application "Finder"
	open folder "Fonts" of folder "Library" of home
	set current view of Finder window 1 to flow view
	set toolbar visible of Finder window 1 to false
	set bounds of Finder window 1 to {375, 239, 988, 667}
	activate
end tell

And here is a short video of the mini application in action: