FontExplorer X's new Character Toolbox is a powerhouse for multilingual publishing because it will show you if the glyphs (characters) you need for your project are included in the fonts you want to use. For example, you could paste in some sample text from your project, or type in some characters or punctuation, to be sure your chosen font actually has them. So if your project will appear in, say Eastern European languages or languages that have accent marks or special characteristic letter combinations, and you know the languages your project requires, but not the specific glyphs, you can simply check the Character Toolbox list of supported languages for that font.

The Character Toolbox is also useful for publishing long documents because it can compare ink and paper usage for various fonts. When designing a book or other long document, it's common to set a portion of it in each font you're considering, to determine its effect on the document length. The Character Toolbox shows you how each selected font compares with your chosen base font for the project: in the example below, we see that a long document set in Minion Regular will require approximately 6.2 percent fewer pages than the same document set in ITC Galliard.

Another Character Toolbox feature--ink usage--is valuable to corporate identity designers. Large corporations print untold reams of paper every day. Saving a few percentage points of ink or toner can have a huge impact on the total cost of printing. In the example above, we see that using Minion Regular for corporate communications will require approximately 7.4 percent less ink or toner than using ITC Galliard. Nice!

One complaint I have about the Character Toolbox is that you have to close it and reopen it to change the fonts it is showing.