Overview

fontdiff is a tool to visually compare differences between two fonts by displaying character atlases overlaid. You run it and it just shows you the differences. It spits out PNGs or SVGs, and you can customise the output a bit.

Install

You can quickly install fontdiff into your home directory straight from github:

pip install --user git+https://github.com/derVedro/fontdiff.git

Alternatively, you can clone the repo and simply run fontdiff.py as a script, or even place a symlink of fontdiff.py to your preferred bin directory.

git clone https://github.com/derVedro/fontdiff.git
cd fontdiff/fontdiff
chmod +x fontdiff.py
ln -s $PWD/fontdiff.py ~/bin/fontdiff

Usage Examples

# regular usage
fontdiff fontA.ttf fontB.ttf

# you can use some predefined char sets
fontdiff fontA.ttf fontB.ttf +greek +numerals

# or even try more options
fontdiff --cell-size 30 --chars "abcde1234!@#$" fontA.ttf fontB.ttf

# save result as file
fontdiff fontA.ttf fontB.ttf > diff.png

# SVG output
fontdiff -s fontA.ttf fontB.ttf

# consider to check all the possible options
fontdiff --help

Dependencies

• python ≥3.11
• pillow ≥10.1.0
• skia-pathops ≥0.8.0.post1
• ziafont ≥0.11
• numpy (optional)

Miscellaneous

You can configure fontdiff by putting a toml config file into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontdiff/ or $HOME/.fontdiff/ directory. An example configuration file is provided in this repository. It's worth taking a look into if you need additional functionality like extra character sets, setting sizes or colors.