Specimen help

Free font finder for Chrome, from MLHMTECH.

Specimen shows you the font a website is really using. This page covers the basics and the most common questions.

Getting started

1. Open any website. Click the Specimen icon in Chrome's toolbar, or press Alt + Shift + F. (If you do not see the icon, click the puzzle-piece button in the toolbar and pin Specimen.)
2. Move your pointer over text. A small tag names the font, its weight and its size.
3. Click text to pin a card with the full details. Press I to list every font on the page. Press Esc to turn Specimen off.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Alt + Shift + F: turn Specimen on or off
• Space: pin the text under the pointer
• I: show every font on the page
• C: copy the hovered text's style as CSS
• Esc: turn Specimen off and remove everything it added to the page

If another program already uses Alt + Shift + F, you can choose a different shortcut at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Fixing common problems

• Nothing happens on a page. Chrome does not let any extension run on its own pages (addresses starting with chrome://), on the Chrome Web Store, or on some browser-owned pages. Specimen's icon shows a dash there. Try an ordinary website.
• It names a different font than the website asked for. That is the point. Specimen reports the font that is actually drawn on screen. If a website's font failed to load, Specimen says a fallback is showing and suggests free lookalikes.
• It cannot read my text. Specimen identifies fonts in live web text. It cannot read text that is part of an image, a video or a canvas.
• Some text inside a frame is not inspected. Content that another website embeds in a frame is kept separate by the browser. Specimen tells you when that happens.
• A font says "installed on your computer". The website asked for a font that is installed on your device, so your browser used that copy.

Your font library and history

Star a font on its card to save it to your library. Open the Specimen options page to search your library, add notes, and export it as CSV, JSON or Markdown. Everything is saved only on your device. You can turn history off, clear it, or delete everything under Settings, then Your data. See the privacy policy.

A note about licenses

Specimen tells you which font a page uses. It does not download font files. Always check a font's license before using it in your own work.

Contact

Something not working, or an idea for Specimen? Email mlhmtech@gmail.com. Tell us what page you were on and what you expected to see, and we will take a look.