Anyway.Fonts Offers Browser-Based Chinese Font Previews With Vertical and Poster Modes

The article says existing font preview tools, including macOS Typeface, are either incomplete in features or pay too little attention to Chinese fonts. Chinese fonts are now much easier to obtain than a decade ago, and they differ in language versions and character sets, making management and comparison more difficult. JJ said he built Anyway.Fonts to address those problems for Chinese-speaking users.

A central feature is character-gap filtering. Users can enter a phrase—such as “陈喆与林珺的婚礼,” which the article uses as a wedding invitation example—and select “only show fonts that don’t lack characters” to narrow the list to fonts that can display the full phrase. JJ wrote that detecting missing characters does not solve the underlying problem and that he has tested an AI glyph-completion plug-in with Codex, but he has not released it because the results are not yet satisfactory and copyright issues remain unclear.

Anyway.Fonts also offers vertical preview. In addition to list and grid views common in similar software, the tool can arrange font cards in narrow vertical columns so users can see how text and punctuation look in vertical web layouts.

The tool includes poster-style previews with more than ten built-in templates in different styles, covering large headlines, full paragraphs, vertical text, two-column layouts and tickets. The article says the templates were mainly generated by AI, though JJ adjusted details and added less conventional elements. The feature is intended to let users see a font in a design context rather than only as a block of sample text. It is not yet suitable for all scenarios or fonts, the article says.

Other features include side-by-side comparison of up to four fonts, line-by-line or overlapping comparison, filtering by style, preset sample text better suited to Chinese usage, filtering variable fonts, font favorites and account synchronization. Chinese fonts are set to display their Chinese names first, according to the article.

Anyway.Fonts is currently free and requires no installation or login, the article says. It works in desktop Chrome or Edge and other browsers, though Safari is not supported because its stricter security prevents reading third-party fonts. Font files are parsed locally on the user’s device and are not uploaded to a server, according to the article.

JJ invited designers who keep hundreds of fonts on their computers to try the tool, compare it with their current software and report any problems. The article describes Anyway.Fonts as an ongoing project that will continue to be developed around the practical needs of Chinese font users.