PopChar X review: Find the character you need in a font without the hassle

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$33.47 single license; $50.22 family package

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Few Mac software can claim the history of PopChar, a click-and-hover utility to see how individual characters look in the fonts installed on your Mac. Released in 1987 for System 5 and revamped as PopChar X for Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002, many current users weren’t born when some of us relied on PopChar as an essential part of our daily workflow in PageMaker, QuarkXPress and InDesign. (Or even on your marks, get set, go!)

From its inception, PopChar jumped up. When you click in a favorite corner of the screen, the utility pops up, giving you easy access to hundreds to tens of thousands of characters in a given font in its palette-like window. Examine the directory available in the font. Hover over a letter to get more information. Click to insert it as plain text, rich text (at a specified size, pair) or HTML. And browse your installed fonts to find the one that best suits what you’re designing or producing. You can adjust the display size of a given font individually if the default is too large or too small.

Even with Shift and/or Option added, pressing keys on the keyboard reveals only a fraction of the characters in modern fonts. (A font here is a set of characters, or glyphs, in a given font and style packaged in a font file.) Many typographical extras are hidden. You either need to use a design program with an option to show all characters, like Adobe InDesign’s Glyph Viewer, or use the Typography option in the Fonts palette, accessible in Pages and many other apps. (See “How to use typographic refinement in Pages and other macOS software.”)

The fonts hide many extras. Many fonts include full Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets; ornate characters; lots of ligatures or letter combinations close together to avoid conflicting stroke parts; small caps, which are essentially “lowercase” capitals; lining (“uppercase”) and old-fashioned numbers (“uppercase/lowercase”); exponents and subscripts; and other symbols.

Apple provides little help, and that’s why PopChar continues to thrive. Before Mac OS X, Apple’s Key Caps app let you select a font and see how characters looked on a keyboard. OS X brought Font Book, which can reveal the full set of characters in a typeface style, but provides no organization, ease of access, or simple insertion into a document.

Beyond the visual digitization of characters, you can retrieve information about them. The hover offers two sets of choices: view information in a populated status bar at the bottom or Ctrl-click for contextual goodies.

The status bar displays all the technical details of the glyph: its decimal number, its Unicode code point, and its full human-readable description in Unicode. The application displays a keyboard symbol plus a flag corresponding to the currently selected keyboard layout. If the keyboard symbol is crossed out with an X, the character cannot be entered with this layout; otherwise, the combination of modifier keys and keys you need to press appears.

The context menu allows you to copy the character’s underlying information as well as search for similar glyph shapes and mark the character as a favorite. Select Character Info and you can view all the font details in a dialog box, including a nice grid display that shows how the letter or symbol fits standard font measurements. You can also see the same glyph on all fonts that contain it in the Fonts tab of Character Info.

If you need a particular character and want to see which fonts have it, hover over the character in a face that does, Ctrl-click and select Mark Fonts Containing “[character]”. PopChar places an identifying symbol next to each font in the left font list that contains a glyph for that element.

Click instead of hovering or Control-clicking and the glyph is placed at the current insertion point in a document, if such a point exists. You can choose from the status bar to insert plain text, rich text at a size at intervals between 9 and 36, or plain HTML. This last option inserts a entityor the shape of the character that works with almost all HTML encodings.

You can use PopChar in several ways. You may know or want to know if a given special character exists in a font you are using. You could be trying to find the typeface that works for a design or interface, but you should examine what the font offers in full before proceeding. Are you looking for a flourish or a symbol? You can quickly browse font collections that you have curated in Font Book using PopChar.

Ergonis, the developer of PopChar, lets you try PopChar indefinitely by installing a free version that only reveals a subset of characters in each font. The company prices its software in Euros: a single-user license costs €29.99 (about $33) for two machines owned by the same person or company, and a non-commercial license for up to five machines is €49.99 (about $55).

PopChar remains a useful addition for print and interactive designers and interface builders 35 years after its introduction. If you have the motor memory to jerk your cursor around a corner and click, it will come back to you. If not, you’ll quickly find that revealing PopChar becomes an instinct.

PopChar X was last revised with version 5.0 in 2010. We said then, “If you work with multilingual or technical documents, or if you frequently use dingbat fonts, PopChar X 5 will quickly pay for itself.”

With the strong resurgence of the Mac in recent years, we want to celebrate the tools we use and recommend to get the most out of your macOS experience. Mac Gems highlights great nuggets of Mac software, apps that have great utility, focus on a limited set of problems to solve, and are typically developed by an individual or a small business. Stay tuned for weekly updates and send your suggestions to the Mac Gems Twitter feed (@macgems).