Fonts

TrueType and OpenType font files open into a specimen view — a sample sentence rasterised through the font and routed through peek's ASCII image pipeline — paired with a rich Info section that decodes every standard OpenType metadata table.

peek Lobster-Regular.ttf
peek /System/Library/Fonts/Menlo.ttc

Supported formats

  • .ttf — TrueType outline fonts
  • .otf — OpenType / CFF outline fonts
  • .ttc / .otc — TrueType / OpenType collections (multiple faces in one file)
  • .woff / .woff2 — WOFF 1.0 / 2.0 web fonts (unwrapped to their inner font before display)

Detection

  • By extension — the four extensions above.
  • By content — 4-byte magic at offset 0: 00 01 00 00 (TrueType), true (Apple TrueType variant), OTTO (OpenType / CFF), ttcf (collection). Unnamed sources (stdin, archive entries) still classify.

Specimen view

The default open lands on a rasterised sample sentence. The current sampler is a hard-coded ASCII pangram plus digits, common punctuation, and a mixed-case alphabet line — enough to show baseline / x-height / cap height / descender shapes.

Specimen view of the Great Vibes TrueType font rendered through peek's ASCII image pipeline

Every image-mode key works on the specimen:

KeyAction
mCycle image mode (full / block / geo / ascii / contour)
bCycle background (auto / black / white / checkerboard)
fCycle fit mode (contain / fit width / fit height)

Zoom / pan keys (Zoom & pan) work on the specimen as well.

A font that the rasteriser can't parse silently falls through to the Info + Hex tail.

Font collections

For .ttc / .otc files, n / p step the active face through the specimen in place. The status line shows Face N/M and updates as you cycle. The Info screen lists every face's metadata block separately — so a four-face Apple system font like Menlo.ttc shows the Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic variants in one screen.

Info

Per face, the Font section surfaces:

  • Identity — family, subfamily (Regular / Bold / Italic / …), full name, Postscript name, version.
  • OS/2 classification — weight (100..900 with the canonical name shown alongside, e.g. 400 (Regular), 700 (Bold)), width class (Normal, Condensed, Expanded, …), italic flag, monospaced pitch flag.
  • Geometry — glyph count, units per em (design grid resolution).
  • Coverage — Unicode codepoint count (summed across every cmap subtable), plus a script list bucketed from cmap ranges: Latin, Latin Extended, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Hangul, CJK, Emoji, Symbols. The list reflects what glyphs the font carries, not what scripts it claims to support.
  • Rendering hints — hinting-present flag (set when head.flags bit 0 is set).
  • Attribution — designer, vendor URL, copyright, license URL (each row is skipped when the name table doesn't carry the field).

Apple system fonts (Menlo, San Francisco, …) still ship their canonical name records on the Macintosh platform in Mac Roman; peek bundles the full Mac Roman upper-half mapping so © / ™ / accented Latin characters round-trip cleanly.

What you don't see

  • The source view is omitted — fonts are binary containers, so the universal hex aux mode (x) handles raw byte inspection.
  • The specimen sampler is hard-coded ASCII; multi-script samplers keyed on cmap coverage are planned.
  • Faces in a .ttc cycle through the specimen in place; true recursive peek into a single face (its own viewer frame) would need to synthesise a standalone SFNT from the TTC table directory, also tracked as a follow-up.