Firefox: Figuring out rendered FONTS

Jorge Fábregas jorge.fabregas at gmail.com
Sat Feb 9 01:28:31 UTC 2008


Hello everyone,

After recently reading the latest Fedora Weekly News (some threads on Firefox 
fonts) I decided to ask this :)

Is there really a way to figure out the final rendered font when viewing a 
page? You see, I always have a have a hard time configuring the fonts on my 
Linux systems (specially Firefox). To work around this issue I had to figure 
out first what was the requested font on a  particular section of a page. I'm 
just lucky that I found the "Font Finder" extension for Firefox where 
basically I'll highlight some text and it will tell me the corresponding 
code. I see something like:

font-family: calibri, tahoma, arial, sans-serif

That's cool, I don't have to dig into CSS files etc....However, I really have 
no idea what font Firefox finally used to render the section. I'm not good at 
identifying the subtle differences between similar fonts...so VISUAL 
identification is out of the question :)   Is there a way to know this for 
sure? Is there a way I could turn some debug mode in Firefox so that when it 
is rendering a page it will give something like this:

REQUESTED FONT FOR THIS SECTION:
font-family: calibri, tahoma, arial, sans-serif

ACTION:
1) calibri not available, tryng next...
2) tahoma not available, trying next...
3) arial FOUND ------> USING ARIAL

Am I asking too much ? :)

Thanks in advance,
Jorge




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