Font management

Font Sources

  1. System: all macOS installed fonts
  2. Glyphs: from open Glyphs.app documents (live reload capable)
  3. Test Install: fonts exported from Glyphs via “Install for Testing”
  4. Imported: manually imported .otf, .ttf, .ttc, .var files
Font picker showing system fonts, Glyphs fonts, and imported fonts

Variable Fonts

  • Axis detection and display (e.g., wght=500, wdth=75)
  • WWS name table integration (Name ID 21/22)
  • Per-instance axis presets from Glyphs
  • Named-instance selection: add a .designspace (or a variable font) with multiple named instances and Hellbox asks which ones to proof. Pick all of them or just the ones you care about, and each chosen instance becomes its own proof row.

Font Sorting

  • Document order, manual, weight, alphabetical, date added
  • Per-section override with independent sort order
  • Ascending or descending direction

Per-Section Font Control

  • Disable specific fonts per section
  • Section-specific font override
  • Per-section font ordering
  • Solo mode: focus on a single font across all sections

Inline Styling & Font Mixing

When a section has more than one font, a Page break / Line break / Mix control decides how they lay out.

Page break (default)

Each font gets its own page or pages. No tag processing.

Line break

Each font’s content is stacked one after another in a single continuous flow, rather than a page per font. On Simple and Waterfall sections, the page header lists only the fonts that actually appear on each page.

Mix: Auto

Auto-distributes multiple fonts across text by weighted probability. Configurable per-font mix weights (e.g., 50% base font, 30% second, 20% third). Seeded random distribution gives reproducible output. Useful for simulating real-world text with multiple weights.

Auto Mode distributing Regular, Medium, and Bold across body text

Mix: Manual

Type <b>, <i>, <u> tags directly in content, or use Cmd+B / Cmd+I on a selection. The parser converts tags to font substitution (the bold tag maps to bold weight, the italic tag maps to italic style). A strip-tags button cleans them out.

For mixing several separate font files into one multi-color specimen (chromatic fonts), see Layered fonts.