GeekFindr: Finding out which font it is
It happens, on occasion, that you come across an image with text that you need to figure out what font was used. Was that sentence even in english? Anyways, your resident font guru is away and you’re left to your own devices. What to do? What to do??
Well, the good folks at MyFonts.com have built just the tool for you. Called What The Font?! it lets you upload or enter the url for the image and then it waves it’s enchanted wand and figures out what the letters are. In the process it tries to confirm with you what each letter is and then it gives you one or several suggestions as to what the font is. All with images of the words you’re looking for to make it easy for you to compare with the original.
I find the process remarkably amazing - how it tries to, I guess, OCR the letters first to find individual bits and ask you to make sure the letters are correctly identified. Then somehow going through it’s DB of images to find likely matches. Very cool. The downside is that the image needs to be pretty sizeable so sometimes you need to blow up the size of it.
Finally as the last resort of desperate webmasters, you can go to their forum (which they link to off the WTF results page) and ask real font gurus what the deal yo. If you dig fonts in general, MyFonts.com is a really nice site with lots of fonts to look through, they have email lists that keep you in the loop on neat fonts with lots of text talking about them (I love design nerdy font talk, personally).
December 9th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Very cool, I will undoubtedly use tis often, thanks!