FontPop documentation

FontPop is a font picker, not a font manager. It reads the fonts on your Mac and shows you the ones on Google Fonts beside them; it never installs, moves, activates or deletes anything. What it gives you is text on your clipboard.

Installing

Open the downloaded FontPop.dmg and drag FontPop to your Applications folder. The first launch opens the picker so you can see what it is; after that it waits in the menu bar.

FontPop needs no permissions at all. It reads font files and asks Google’s servers for the font catalog — nothing else.

Summoning it

Press ⌘⌥F from anywhere, or click the Aa icon in the menu bar. Press it again, or press Escape, to put it away.

FontPop has no Dock icon, deliberately: an app with one is tied to a single Space and can’t appear over a full-screen app, which is exactly when you tend to want a font picker. If you open FontPop again from the Finder or Spotlight while it’s already running, it summons the picker.

Right-click the menu bar icon to switch between the popover (hanging off the icon) and a floating window that remembers where you put it. Either can be resized from any edge or corner.

To keep the menu bar clear, turn off Show icon in the menu bar in Settings ▸ General. The popover hangs from that icon, so FontPop switches to window mode while it’s hidden; reach it with ⌘⌥F or by opening it again from the Finder or Spotlight. Choosing popover mode brings the icon back.

Your sample text

The field at the top of the middle column is the point of the app. Type anything into it and every row redraws in that text. Judge a typeface on the words you’re actually setting — a name, a headline, a price — rather than on somebody else’s pangram. The size slider beside it scales every row at once.

Scopes and filters

The sidebar answers one question: what am I looking at. All Fonts, Installed (the ones you added), System (Apple’s), and Google Fonts. Below that, collections — Pinned, Monospace, Variable — and then styles: serif, sans, slab, script, display, symbol.

A Google font you’ve already installed appears once, and shows up under both Installed and Google Fonts.

Each scope remembers where you were in it, so switching between them returns you to the place you left rather than to the top of a list you haven’t seen. Click the scope you’re already in to go back to the top of it.

Searching

Search is focused the moment the picker opens, so you can just start typing. It matches family names, and it narrows the sidebar too — categories with no matches drop out, so you can see at a glance where the matches live.

Fonts that can render your text

Paste text in a script you care about — Vietnamese, Polish, Greek, Cyrillic — into the sample field and click the checkmark beside it. The list collapses to the fonts that can actually draw every character.

For installed fonts this is exact: FontPop asks the font itself. For Google fonts that aren’t installed there’s no file to ask, so it goes on the subsets Google publishes for the family — close, but a claim rather than a measurement.

Pinning

Hover any row and click the pin, or right-click the row and choose Pin or Unpin. With VoiceOver, Pin and Unpin are an action on every row. Pinned fonts float to the top of whatever you’re looking at. There’s a Pinned scope in the sidebar, and an Unpin All in Settings ▸ Fonts.

Copy formats

Select a font and the details pane offers every form it can hand you:

• Family and PostScript names.
• SwiftUI — Font.custom("…", fixedSize:) — and AppKit’s NSFont(name:size:). Both use the PostScript name, because that’s what actually resolves.
• CSS stack, with a generic fallback matched to the font’s own class.
• @font-face for a font you’re self-hosting.
• <link> and @import for Google fonts, with every weight the family offers.

Right-click any row in the list for the same formats without leaving the list.

Variable axes

For a variable font, the details pane gives you a slider per axis. Drag one and the sample redraws in that instance; Copy CSS gives you the font-variation-settings that produced it.

This works for fonts installed on your Mac. A Google font you haven’t installed lists its axes but can’t be dragged — download the family and install it, and the sliders appear.

If a family you have installed says the installed copy is static, its files are fixed instances — one file per weight, with no axes in them — which is what Google’s per-weight downloads are. Download the family again through FontPop: it takes the variable build where one exists.

The glyph browser

The Glyphs row in the details pane shows how many characters a font contains; the magnifying glass opens them all. Search by typing a character, by its Unicode name, or by U+ codepoint. Click a glyph to copy it, or right-click for its codepoint, HTML entity or Swift literal.

Very large fonts are capped at the first 6,000 characters — the footer says so when that happens.

Getting a Google font

FontPop previews a Google font by fetching a single weight temporarily. That copy is not a font you own, so it isn’t offered as a file.

When you want the real thing, use Download Family: pick a folder and FontPop fetches the family plus the license file it’s distributed under, named the way Google names them. Then install it however you like — dragging it onto Font Book is the usual way.

For a family with variable axes that means the variable build: one file covering the whole weight range (and a second for the italics), which is what makes the axis sliders work once it’s installed. Families without axes, and the handful whose variable build isn’t published, arrive as one file per weight and italic instead.

The picker steps aside while you choose a folder, and comes back when you’re done.

View on Google Fonts opens the family’s page if you’d rather go to the source.

Keyboard

• ⌘⌥F — show or hide FontPop, from anywhere.
• ⌘F — jump to the search field.
• ↑ / ↓ — move through the list, even while typing.
• Return — copy the selected family name.
• Escape — leave the search field, or put FontPop away.
• Tab — after Escape has left the search field, go back into it.
• ⌘W — close the picker, or the frontmost FontPop window.

Interface size

Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Interface Size makes FontPop’s own labels, buttons and icons larger without changing your display’s resolution. Choose Default or Large. The sidebar and details pane widen to fit, and at Large the details pane’s text grows a little more than the rest. The sample rows aren’t affected — they keep their own size slider.

Accessibility

FontPop works with VoiceOver and Voice Control. Every button has a spoken name, sidebar rows say which one is selected, and each font in the list reads as one line: its name, how many faces it has, and whether it’s monospaced, pinned or from Google Fonts. Sliders say what they control and their value, glyphs are read by their Unicode name, and copying announces “Copied”.

The sidebar and details toggles show a pressed-in plate when they’re on, not only a change of color, and folding a sidebar section follows Reduce Motion.

Settings

General — start at login, the menu bar icon, and the summon shortcut. Appearance — Interface Size, popover or window, whether an outside click dismisses the popover, and which panes show. Sidebar — which rows appear. Fonts — the catalog status, your sample text and size, and your pins.

Updates

FontPop checks for updates daily and can install them itself. Check manually with Check for Updates… in the … menu.

Licensing

FontPop is free to try. Every tenth time you open the picker, unlicensed, it shows a reminder — no watermark, no expiry, nothing withheld. A license removes the reminder.

Buy from the button on the FontPop page, then paste the key into Enter License… in the … menu, which is also where your license lives once it’s activated. One license covers your own Macs. FontPop is also in the bundles.