Changelog

Version 1.0.240

Latest August 30, 2026

Fonts and languages

• Reads TrueType, OpenType, TrueType/OpenType collections, WOFF and WOFF2 — including WOFF2’s transformed glyph table, which is not a decompression but a reconstruction from seven separate streams.
• Per-language coverage for Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Pashto, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Saraiki, Uyghur and Sorani Kurdish. Not “has Arabic letters” — whether the font has every letter that language needs.
• Joining-form and mark-positioning analysis, so a face that has the letters but cannot join them is not mistaken for one that works.
• Recognises pre-Unicode InPage-era fonts — the ones whose codepoints carry no Unicode meaning — and says so instead of showing rows of empty boxes.
• A face inside a collection is a font in its own right: it can be previewed, tagged and installed separately from its neighbours in the same file.

Looking at fonts

• Previews shaped with a real complex-script engine, so Nastaliq joins and reads as it will in a document.
• Each font is shown a sample it can actually render, chosen from its own coverage rather than from its name.
• In the detail pane, a specimen per script a face covers. Latin, Arabic and Urdu get phrases; every other language shows the letters it adds to Arabic, which is the part worth looking at.
• Size ladders, a complete glyph map, and an OpenType feature playground.
• Side-by-side comparison with an onion-skin overlay normalised by cap height, not by nominal point size, plus metrics, glyph-coverage and feature differences.
• Similar-font search and headline/body pairing suggestions, from your own library.

Organising

• Libraries — add a folder and read every font in it without installing anything.
• Sets you assemble by hand, and smart lists that keep themselves current.
• Tags, ratings, colours and notes, keyed to the font’s own content so they survive it being moved, renamed or reinstalled elsewhere.
• Faceted filtering, and a box that takes pasted text and shows only the fonts that can render all of it.
• A dashboard that says what the library holds: how much of it is installed, which languages it can set, its formats and foundries, and what is worth a look.

Installing

• Install for yourself with no administrator prompt, or for everyone with a single one.
• Temporary activation — a font usable in Word, InPage and everything else on the desktop until FontDesk closes, with nothing copied and nothing to uninstall. Released on exit.
• Safe uninstall that refuses to remove the faces Windows itself draws its interface with, and says which and why.
• Conflict detection for duplicate family claims and version mismatches.
• Undo history for every install and removal. Uninstalling keeps a copy first, so undo really does put the font back.

Making things

• Printable type specimens as real vector PDF — A4 or US Letter — and printing of the same sheet.
• Backup and restore of libraries, sets, tags, ratings and notes. Restoring merges rather than replaces, so work done since the backup survives it.

The window

• Light and dark chrome, or following Windows. Dark is grey rather than black or navy, so the only colour on screen is the type.
• A command palette on Ctrl+K reaching every command and every destination by name, matched by subsequence — adlib finds Add library.
• Ctrl+F focuses search, F5 rescans.
• Settings for the theme, the preview text and size, install defaults, the startup rescan, the specimen paper, and what the caches hold.

Notes

• FontDesk works entirely offline. It has no account, no telemetry, and makes no network connections of any kind.
• Type 1 (.pfb, .pfm) and legacy .FON bitmap fonts are recognised and listed, but not read. They are reported as unsupported rather than as damaged, because they are neither.
• The build number rises with every build, so a version reads 1.0.<days since 2026-01-01>. A release pins it.