How to Find Out What Fonts a Program is Using

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Ever fired up a new app and immediately wondered what fonts its using in its UI? Mac apps by default use Lucida Grande, but that’s quickly changing. iOS 7’s focus on typography has Mac app developers experimenting with their own unique display fonts more than ever, and writing apps like Writer Pro often bundle their own editing fonts (and App Store don’t install their fonts system-wide as Microsoft Office or Creative Suite always has).

There’s no reason to guess what fonts an app is using, though. Here’s how you can quickly find out what fonts any app on a Mac is using.

Just launch the app in question, then open Activity Monitor and double-click on the app you’re curious about. That’ll open the process info about that particular program. There, click the Open Files and Ports button, select all the text in that text box, and copy it.

Now, just open your favorite text editor (anything works here—TextEdit, Sublime Text, or even a word processor like Pages) and paste that text you just copied. You’ll just need to search through this text to find the open font files—which will include all fonts that app is using. Tap Cmd-F or open your app’s search menu manually, and search for font, .ttf, or .otf, and you’ll find every font in use and its location on your Mac. There will be more fonts than you might expect—you’ll almost always find Helvetica and Lucida Grande open for some reason, but with a tiny bit of looking around you’ll be able to find that mystery typeface. In this case, I was able to find that the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is using a variant of Proxima Nova.

There’s one slightly easier method: you could just browse through the contents of the app and find any contained files. That’d work for App Store apps, assuming they’re bundling their own fonts and aren’t using any system fonts you don’t recognize. But, it won’t help you find fonts installed in another way, such as the font files from Creative Cloud’s Typekit font sync and other such sources.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.