fontwhich: Determine fonts used to render text

This is a package candidate release! Here you can preview how this package release will appear once published to the main package index (which can be accomplished via the 'maintain' link below). Please note that once a package has been published to the main package index it cannot be undone! Please consult the package uploading documentation for more information.

[maintain] [Publish]

Warnings:

[missing-upper-bounds] On executable 'fontwhich', these packages miss upper bounds: - bytestring - extra - gi-pango - gi-pangocairo - simple-cmd - simple-cmd-args - text Please add them. There is more information at https://pvp.haskell.org/

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.

[Skip to Readme]

Properties

Versions	0.1.0, 0.1.0
Change log	ChangeLog.md
Dependencies	base (<5), bytestring, extra, gi-pango, gi-pangocairo, simple-cmd, simple-cmd-args, text [details]
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>
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
Uploaded	by JensPetersen at 2026-02-27T05:54:56Z

Downloads

fontwhich-0.1.0.tar.gz [browse] (Cabal source package)
Package description (as included in the package)

Maintainer's Corner

Package maintainers

JensPetersen

For package maintainers and hackage trustees

edit package information

Readme for fontwhich-0.1.0

[back to package description]

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 --help

fontwhich

Usage: fontwhich [--version] [-f|--font FONT] [-l|--lang LANG] [-x|--hex] [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
  -x,--hex                 Output UTF-8 hex codes

$ fontwhich Hello 🌍 World 世界

23 bytes
'Hello ' : Noto Sans
'🌍' : Noto Color Emoji
' World ' : Noto Sans
'世界' : Noto Sans CJK JP

$ fontwhich -f Serif "こんにちは 😀 世界"

27 bytes
'こんにちは ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'😀' : Noto Color Emoji
' ' : Noto Serif CJK JP
'世界' : Noto Serif CJK JP

$ fontwhich -l ja

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

$ fontwhich --hex 🍊

4 bytes
'🍊' [f0 9f 8d 8a] : Noto Color Emoji

Building and installation

On Fedora:

$ cabal-rpm builddep
$ cabal install

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

Misc

Code was assisted with Gemini Pro 3.1.

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

Collaborate

The code is distributed under GPLv3+.

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