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fontwhich: Determine fonts used to render text

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Fontwhich is a commandline tool that used pango to determine which default fonts would be used to render some text, or which font would be used for a particular language script.

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Versions [RSS] 0.1.0, 0.2, 0.2.1, 0.3
Change log ChangeLog.md
Dependencies base (<5), bytestring, extra, gi-pango, gi-pangocairo, simple-cmd, simple-cmd-args, text, unicode-data-names, unicode-data-scripts [details]
Tested with ghc ==9.2.8 || ==9.4.8 || ==9.6.7 || ==9.8.4 || ==9.10.3 || ==9.12.3
License GPL-3.0-or-later
Copyright 2026 Jens Petersen <juhpetersen@gmail.com>
Author Jens Petersen <juhpetersen@gmail.com>
Maintainer Jens Petersen <juhpetersen@gmail.com>
Uploaded by JensPetersen at 2026-03-26T11:42:25Z
Category Utility
Home page https://github.com/juhp/fontwhich
Bug tracker https://github.com/juhp/fontwhich/issues
Source repo head: git clone https://github.com/juhp/fontwhich.git
Distributions
Executables fontwhich
Downloads 37 total (14 in the last 30 days)
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Status Docs not available [build log]
All reported builds failed as of 2026-03-26 [all 2 reports]

Readme for fontwhich-0.2.1

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Fontwhich

Fontwhich is a small CLI tool that uses pango to show which default fonts are used to render some text.

It should work on any Linux distro with the Cairo and Pango libraries: it requires the fonts to be available but not a graphical session.

Usage

$ fontwhich --version

0.2.1

$ fontwhich --help

fontwhich

Usage: fontwhich [--version] [-f|--font FONT] [-l|--lang LANG] [-b|--utf8]
                 [-u|--unicode] [TEXT]

  Describes the fonts used to render text with pango

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  --version                Show version
  -f,--font FONT           Base font [default: Sans]
  -l,--lang LANG           Language code
  -b,--utf8                Output UTF-8 hex codes
  -u,--unicode             Output Unicode data

$ fontwhich Hello 🌍 World δΈ–η•Œ

'Hello ' : Noto Sans
'🌍' : Noto Color Emoji
' World ' : Noto Sans
'δΈ–η•Œ' : Noto Sans CJK JP

$ fontwhich -f Serif "こんにけは πŸ˜€ δΈ–η•Œ"

'こんにけは ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'πŸ˜€' : Noto Color Emoji
' ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'δΈ–η•Œ' : Noto Serif CJK JP

$ fontwhich -l ja

Primary Sans font for ja is: "Noto Sans CJK JP"

$ fontwhich --utf8 🌳

4 bytes;
'🌳' [f0 9f 8c b3] : Noto Color Emoji

$ fontwhich --unicode Ξ±Ξ²ΰ₯§ΰ₯¨

10 bytes; 2 pango items
'Ξ±Ξ²' : Noto Sans
Ξ± <U+03B1>: GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA [Greek]
Ξ² <U+03B2>: GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA [Greek]
'ΰ₯§ΰ₯¨' : Noto Sans Devanagari
ΰ₯§ <U+0967>: DEVANAGARI DIGIT ONE [Devanagari]
ΰ₯¨ <U+0968>: DEVANAGARI DIGIT TWO [Devanagari]

One can use both options together:

$ fontwhich --utf8 🍊 --unicode

4 bytes;
'🍊' [f0 9f 8d 8a] : Noto Color Emoji
🍊 <U+1F34A>: TANGERINE [Common]

Building and installation

On Fedora, install system deps with cabal-rpm builddep.

C library dependencies:

  • Fedora: cairo-devel pango-devel gobject-introspection-devel
  • Ubuntu: libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev libgirepository1.0-dev

Then:

$ cabal install

or

$ stack install

There is a copr repo: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/petersen/fontwhich/

Misc

Code assisted with Gemini 3.1.

The tool is related conceptually to https://github.com/sudipshil9862/whichfont (C codebase).

"fontwhich" as in "sandwhich" but with fonts.

Collaborate

The code is distributed under GPLv3+.

Repository: https://github.com/juhp/fontwhich