When the “Show Emoji & Symbols” repeatedly starting failing on my Mac (a common problem according to the web), I desperately looked for a substitute. And I got just that with this app—and SO MUCH MORE. In addition to showing you how to type special characters, it lets you search for them by their Unicode names, and as a developer, I can take full advantage of that. But there’s more! As a designer, I can put in sample text and see it in all sorts of different fonts, helping me pick just the one I need to make my client happy and express the emotion I need for a project. I’ve slowly built up again a set of favorite characters (and thank you for providing THAT feature!) that I use daily in my work and correspondance. Ultra Character Map deserves its name: it truly is the ultimate character map!
I use some music symbol fonts, and I have missed some long lost function to look at keycaps to see where the symbols "live" on the keyboard. Ultra Character Map does two things I've found very helpful. First, it can create font catalog (print or PDF) that you can customize. This is great when you have large numbers of fonts (like when you stupidly install one of those 2000 fonts collections). And second, it can create a reference file to show you all the characters that are available in that font. Though this isn't a KeyCap option, at least you can find your desired character easily, and either copy-paste or use the key-strokes (which are shown).
I have a number of homemade fonts (made using the late, lamented Fontographer) that have special symbols not used in Unicode. this is a great way to find out where everything is. Once any letter is highlighted, you can type any key combination to go to the letter it encodes. The “but” in my review title is: this feature doesn’t work for accented characters that require two successive keystrokes. The letter ü (u with an umlaut) is option-u, followed by u. The letter é is option-e, then e. If you type option-u, u in Ultra Character Map, it ignores the first input, and just gives you lower-case u. Should be fixable, though. Developers, are you reading?
I love this little program. I use it to enlarge the Apple emoji characters so I can see them more easily. Also, I can quickly view all of the characters of any font to find just the right one for any project. I especially like the ability to copy any character of any font to memory as text or as a graphic. I can paste a graphic font character onto a page, set its attribute to ‘wrap’ or ‘no wrap’ and easily resize it to whatever I need without disturbing the size of existing fonts and line spacing on a page.
If you want to fill your manuscript with accents, diacriticals or pronunciation marks then Ultra Character Mao is indispensible. The one glaring flaw is that the size setting for characters are the same for both screen display AND for copying and pasting. This is very inconvenient as I need to see with my eyes the characters I am choosing to copy (so the sizes need to display the marks in conspicouous ways) but I then need to modify the size on my manuscript when pasting. Programmers, please fix!
I used this to find characters for music like the last review. I guess I didn’t notice that it didn’t have key combinations. However, this totally changed the way I used some text symbols in a class seating chart (I teach music). I was able to grab symbols to use (like the emojees) without hunting around and use them as a graphic file. From B’bba’s review, it sounded like it could use a couple of features, but it sure was a pleasant surprise for what I was using it for.
I can access glyphs and diacriticals without having to create the text in Photoshop. Can even do some basic metallic & 3D text on the fly. Essential for anyone who creates text documents as a graphic design. Would like to have the font name prominent at the top, especially since the representations in the side bar are often illegible. With this improvement this app will truly rate 5 stars.
New and improved, this is a great and useful application, but...
it has one drawback. It would be beneficial to the users to be able to search the font names for a specific font instead of having to scroll through all the fonts to find the one you want. But that's a quibble.
I totally misunderstood what I was looking at. I found that I was so very wrong. This is great software when you understand it. That is why I am changing this from a 1 star to a 5. While you do have to make the characters 1 at a time. That is a small thing compared to the results you get! I am giving this a 5.
I used a Windows for years & used Character Map UWP. I've been looking for a program on my MAC that is comparable to that. This app is EXACTLY like it! I'm sp glad I found it! I'M ABLE TO SEE ALL MY FONTS & its eaSy to transfer the glyphs to all the programs I use. I love it.
Every now and then, you run across an app that fills a much needed gap - this is it. It REALLY should be part of the core macOS set of utilities. The Emoji & Symbols app is totally pathetic and marginally useful. If you are authoring or creating content, you need this app. I can't recommend it highly enough.
During the Mountain Lion OS era, the native Mac font manager, Font Book, becamse very unstable (for me, anyway). I bought this app to help fine tune (and find) glyphs, special characters, etc., in conjunction most often with doing comic book lettering and in InDesign. It proved enormously helpful. So, highly recommended.
great little application displays your entire font family that is on your computer, you can size the window to your screen and you really get to see your fonts in all there glory ;-)
Works great! I can find all the characters for every font. Especially use if for the large variety of music fonts—knowing exactly what symbol each key represents has saved lots of time.
I have many fonts installed including music and math specialty fonts and collections of glyphs. I can find what I want quickly and get them into my document with ease! I highly recommend this Ultra Character Map.
Gives me all the characters I need for writing in multiple languages as well as uncommon symbols. Also has very nice feature of metallic finishes and multiple colors for characters. Well worth the price.
A perfect app for font lovers. Please continue to keep it up to date so we can use it forever! It ould be nice if we could filter fonts by their names.
Great when you want to replicate or approximate a strange glyph, to find it buried in a font you own, but made with three unintuitive keystrokes, like apothecary synbols in a paper i was writing! indispensable!
I’m using it as the table for a rather complex music signs font is incorrect and incomplete. What ULTRA CHARACTER MAP cannot provide is a clear picture of the application of multiple character forms. This might be useful to add.
I sure it's really great, I'm just new to it and not sure how to really use it. I other. fonts come out in blocks and when I type with it in cricut it changes to normal font writing.
Is there no way to create folders in this to organise fonts?
I have looked everywhere, but can’t find any way to create my own folders in this so I can organize fonts. Surely there must be a way? It’s just a totally useless bit of software if there is no way to actually group and organise fonts.
This is GREAT. I am a professional graphic designer and it is really nice to be able to access all the glyphs (even hidden ones) without actually having to be in a design or document layout app. Compare feature is nice, and the keyboard shortcut feature is nice. ONE ISSSUE and only for pro graphic users, is the ability to see ONLY fonts installed on your system, library and user folders. I have font management software,as do most other graphic professionals, and it stores the fonts in another location to keep my system clean and fast. 4000 fonts in the Library or User folder is not an option, so the ability to point this app to other locations would be greatly appreciated. Other than that, no complaints and worth the money
Update on my rating from before. This is a great utility that finally replaces the sorely missed Character Map utility from long ago. Easy to use with quite powerful extra features. Originally I had rated this only 4 stars because it was not fully compatible with older versions of the OS in allowing access to additional font libraries (e.g., Microsoft specific libraries). That ancient issue resolved, this app is simply essential for anyone requiring access to less common symbols in particular fonts. I need this all the time in my academic writing. Can’t recommend this highly enough.
Finally! A font application that every designer can love!
I’ve been an illustrator and graphic designer for over 25 years, and one of my big annoyances has been the fact that I couldn’t find a font display application that would let me see how my logo typeface, headline, or paragraph would look at a glance. I was always having to do that in my actual Adobe illustrator document, which was always such a time consuming task. Until now - Ultra Character Map has worked it all out. It does everything it claims, and does it really well. It’s interface is streamlined and super easy to use. In addition to it’s great sentence display features, you can change character color, create three dimensional characters, and best of all - create vectors from the individual characters! - And then drag them into the vector program of your choice! It’s already saved me a vast amount of project development time. All in all - an awesome application! And the mere $10 cost is the best money you’ll ever spend on an app. A super 5 star rating is well deserved! I only hope you have plans (though I don’t know how) to make it even better! Kudos - Ultra Character developers!
Robust & handles lots of use cases for people who work with type
I’m very happy with Ultra. One of my major needs was being able to use our brand’s custom icon font. The native Mac FontBook doesn’t make it easy / possible to browse all glyphs of a font and then copy them correclty. Ultra works very well for this use case. It mostly closely reminds me of the glyph browser in Adobe InDesign — but in this case, accessible system-wide (and of course much less epxensive and lightweight). I do wish a simple CMD-C would copy the glyph (instead of the more complicated shortcut that’s assigned to this) but oh well. A minor optimization.
I have used a similar program in earlier versons of Mac OS X, but is now gone. I also depend on a similar program whenver I work in Windows as well. Since I do graphic design I find the added ability to use a graphic version of each character and be able to alter it’s appearance to meet the context of my work. I am glad that there is this program available at a minimal cost that offers all of these great features. Thank you to XO4 Studios for creating this very useful application and making it available for all of us.
It is very useful, a clean, intuitive interface. Particularly with a phonetic font like CharisSil. However I would like to see a feature added that would make it much more useful for IPA transcription. It would be very nice if one could accumulate several characters to a field which you could copy as text. That would make it a lot less laborious to create diphthongs and triphthongs to the system keyboard replacement set. I’m sure this proposed function would make it very useful for many other purposes.
Don't make the same mistake I did. Research the built-in alternatives before buying this. OSX Mountain Lion (and perhaps other OS versions as well) includes three built-in font tools - the "Font Book" app (Applications folder) and both the "Keyboard Viewer" and "Character Viewer" in the menu bar (latter two accessible through "Language & Text" preference panel). These three great tools combined offer nearly everything this app ("Ultra Character Map") offers and significantly more than the previous "Character Map" offered. Given that, what very little more this app supposedly offers (haven't found that yet) is just not worth the money.
Very useful tool for any design work involving fonts
I do a lot of personalized work for custom albums and books we make, and using Ultra character map is a great tool to choose fonts that work with my designs. I can put in my text and see easily and quickly how it looks with different fonts - I’ve over 600 installed - which is a lot better than cycling through them one by one in Illustrator. A great companion app for working with Illustrator, and I have it open all the time.
Fantastic app to replace the horrible Apple character viewer
Ever since Apple “updated” their character viewer tool with something wholly useless, our team has been in need of an app that allows us to clearly see all the glyphs within a font, the character codes, the keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to copy either the character itself or the vector outline of the character into our designs. This app does all of that. Easy to use, clear, and a designer’s lifesaver. Worth every penny.
I wanted an easy way to access/search symbols provided by individual fonts and this does the job quite nicely. The alternatives I found either didn't seem to provide a clear way to switch between the font being used or were just really expensive ($40). So for me, the other features (like the font catalog text comparisons) were gravy, but are actually really useful.
This is a great program but I'm perplexed why Apple decided to take away necessary functions from its own Character Viewer. This program is much more elegant and has additional features that are very good, and I'm happy to support independent developers. At the same time, I question why I must purchase a new app to restore a feature that's been part of OSX forever and that was more convenient to use. Please, Apple, communicate!
Many programs don’t give easy accesss to the zillions of hidden characters burried in modern fonts. Ultra Character Map displays absolutely everything in a font, including characters for which there are no codes or magic key combinations. It also allows a number of ways to export characters into other programs as text image or even editable vectors. Every aspect of the app is intuitive and smooth. Nicer Job
This is everything I ever wanted from a character viewer: it’s fast, displays all of the relevant information, and allows you to copy selections to the clipboard quickly and in a variety of formats. An amazing feature not useful to everyone is the ability to copy the shape path of the character – amazing, if you work in Illustrator.
I purchased this so I could use the glyphs in my fonts. I like that I can see and select every alternative a font offers. But I cannot actually copy it and use it! In font #1 that I tried, the glyphs I wanted to use weren't supported. So the option to copy them was greyed out. In font #2, I could copy a STANDARD character, but when I pasted it into the program I was using, it wouldn't let me paste it in the same font! I could "paste" the character as a different font, but then the program I was using wouldn't let me change it back to font #2. And of course, there's no option to return an app for a refund...
I've been revewing various apps for digging through font glyphs over the last few weeks. This is the first app I've come across that is well designed, does what it advertises, and doesn't get in the way of simply reviewing the assets within a font. Perfect for identifying and using common character glyphs from Segoe UI Symbol, Awesome Font, etc.
Ultra Character Map is a really great app. It’s one of the most frequently used apps on my Mac. It’s not perfect—there are some features I’d like to see added (which didn’t affect my rating), and it’s performance can slow a bit when rendering certain “rough” textured fonts (which did affect my rating)—but nothing is. All in all, a very solid app and one that’s well worth the cost.
Not just another character map. (Really.) Did you know that many fonts contain characters and pictures that cannot be accessed with the keyboard or even with a regular character palette? Ultra Character Map lets you access any character or glyph in any font and use it in other apps. It also lets you do side-by-side font comparisons, print font catalogs, view detailed character and font information (including the keystroke combinations that produce special or accented characters) and much more. And it's really easy to use. Main Features: - Unlock everything your fonts have to offer. Access any character, symbol or glyph in any font and use it in your documents. - Fun with colors and 3D effects. Create your own clip art by applying colors and 3D effects to any character, symbol or glyph. - Say it in Emoji. Ultra Character Map gives you access to all Emoji characters available in macOS. To use an Emoji character, just drag or copy it into your document. - Compare fonts the easy way. Enter text once, then simply scroll through a list to see a preview in every font. Don't want to look at all your fonts? You can filter the list by style, classification, collection, name or font folder. Ultra Character Map lets you preview header or paragraph text and includes preset samples to save you even more time. - Print font catalogs and font samples. Ultra Character Map lets you print custom font catalogs, font samples and character maps or save them as PDF documents. - Useful tools for graphic designers, webmasters and app developers. Ultra Character Map shows all the glyphs in your fonts (even glyphs that are not associated with a character) and lets you view Bézier curves and copy them to other apps. It also features an HTML entity palette, a Unicode 11.0 grid and panels that display extensive character and font information. But wait, there's more. Ultra Character Map lets you pick favorite fonts and characters, view characters or text copied from other apps, view the keystrokes that produce specific characters (even if they require multiple steps, such as "Option-N then Shift-N") and much more.
