View all a fonts characters app?

Solution 1:

Font Book does in fact have a view that displays all glyphs provided by a font — just select Preview - Repertoire on the menu bar:

You can also get a preview of a font using Quick Look: select a font file (from /Library/Fonts) and press space.

Solution 2:

I use character maps heavily and decides to make one which you access from anywhere using a web interface and requires no installation.

Features

• Select your own font file
• Provides font and character information
• Character copy-able
• Supports TTF/OTF
• Supports Icon fonts
• Smooth interface
• No installation necessary
• No server upload necessary

Screenshot

Solution 3:

I guess you're on Lion - right ?

Because in Snow-Leopard you could get that by showing the "character viewer" from the inputs menu or launching directly /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app as described here and choosing "Glyph" view.

Check out the new smilies (now part of the Unicode standard ;) in the DejaVu font

But if you still got access to a Snow-Leopard installation you can copy the CharacterPalette.app from /System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app and it will run on Lion, I would not recommend replacing the Lion version, but rather keeping the Snow-Leopard CharacterPalette as separate app - why did Apple have to make it worse in the first place ?!

As you can drag & drop glyphs from the Snow-Leopard Character Palette but not from the new Lion Font Book...

This idea was inspired by Is it possible to use the character map as a standalone app?

Solution 4:

Alternatively in System Preferences -> International in the Input Menu tab there is an option to place a Character Palette on the menu bar that can (among other things) show you all the glyphs in a particular font, what the glyph is called and allow you to insert the character into a document or text field.