WhatTheFont – Shazam for Fonts | Hacker News Reader

WhatTheFont – Shazam for Fonts

myfonts.com

276 pointstiff87 comments

AFAIK it's the best of its sort, but I've used it a few times (not for a few years though) and I don't think I've ever found the actual font. Though of course it finds similar fonts which sometimes can be enough.

I agree that it’s the best of its sort, at least compared to the other popular options I’ve used, but it’s not being compared to much. The rest seem barely usable at best and just designed to get you to buy any font whatsoever.

I still occasionally use it when I’m totally stuck but have had pretty crappy luck with getting an exact match.

What it’s been pretty good for is getting me close enough to look for other things that look similar to it’s suggestions and branching out from there.

My secret used to be http://www.typophile.com/ which had a font id forum and you'd get an answer from someone usually within a few hours. It was a really cool place.

They were down for a while so I don't know if that community re-formed or not.

https://www.reddit.com/r/identifythisfont works fairly well.

whatTheFont also has a forum that you can automatically post to if the auto search doesn't find anything

> I don't think I've ever found the actual font.

True.

But I guess we have to accept that fact that the app will only ID fonts that are in it's (premium paid) DB.

I always dreamed about an alternative that does the same visual identification but matches closest-fit to a database of free opensource fonts.

That would be awesome because fonts can get expensive, especially for websites and pay-per-traffic pricing!

Clearly this is a fairly niche application, but all the same I’m surprised no one has built a font identifier in the past few years based on modern machine learning techniques.

I think Adobe is now offering something like that with the latest Creative Suite, though I don't know if it employs ml. The last Photoshop had that functionality and they seem to have expanded on it.

I was wondering if that is what inspired this thread, the threat of Adobe.

It's been in there for a couple of years (Photoshop CC 2015.5) and it matches installed fonts and fonts available through Typekit. Type > Match Font...

> I don't think I've ever found the actual font.

I did, sometimes. When it works, it works great, but often it doesn't. There are also Matcherator[1] and What Font is[2], but they are not better or worse in my admittedly limited experience.

[1] https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator

[2] https://www.whatfontis.com/

Personally, I've had much more luck with the manual font identifying tools which ask you specific questions about the letters you have. Mostly because often the font I'm looking for is on an image with a lot of noise and these automatic systems have a hard time isolating the letter.

http://www.identifont.com/

https://www.fonts.com/id/by-sight

Give the new mobile version a try. It's built on deep learning so it's more accurate: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/

I used it to find the font that Postman uses in their results. No luck.

But a tweet to Postman reveals they use Cuisine, which is a very pretty font.

I've been using them a bunch for this little plaything https://javascriptbabybooks.com/ and since I don't need to find the exact font (a close match is just fine), they've been wonderful.

Personally, I don't use the mobile app and my use case is only on the desktop, so I hope they roll their update out for the desktop soon.

Hey, I'm part of the team that made this, and you have the wrong link. This is our new mobile app: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/

It's powered by deep learning, and it's way better and more accurate than the current desktop version that's linked here.

Why the mobile version is "way better and more accurate" when, I believe, most people wanting to know the name of a font are people working on a computer?

Because we rolled out the mobile update first.

And when will you be rolling out the desktop version?

Absolutely - I've used 'WTF' quite a lot over the years, never once from a mobile, nor can I imagine ever doing so.

I'm certainly not going to start taking photos of my monitor here, anyway!

Odd.

What's wrong with taking photo of your monitor?

What's right, in this context?

Normally I'm not the fan of unneeded mobile app dependence of things (e.g. home lighting). But in this case, taking photo of your computer monitor and getting font name as result seems more convenient than taking screenshot, cropping, uploading, etc...

If you're on a Mac, try Command + Shift + 4 to take a screenshot with a crop tool that's saved on your ~/Desktop folder.

The Windows equivalent (it sounds like) is Snipping Tool. Start -> Snip will show it. Or you can navigate to it under accessories. Extremely handy.

try command + cntrl + shift + 4.

copies the image straight into the clipboard, no detritus to your desktop. many web apps will just accept the cmd +V paste like an uploaded file.

I just tried a couple of photos of websites from my monitor and it's really nowhere near close to identifying. One of them was roboto from the play store which I'd have hoped would be an easy one.

Does it struggle with photos of screens in particular?

Are you using another device to capture the screen contents or directly dumping the screen to a file?

No, it does fine with screens. The problem you're encountering is that we don't have any Google Fonts in the MyFonts library currently. The app can only return fonts that we have on MyFonts.

> The app can only return fonts that we have on MyFonts.

Oh, so it's actually a useless tool then. Thanks for the clarification.

Hey, that's not nice.

MyFonts is one of the best font sites I know of, with a huge selection of fonts and top designers. There are regular offers on new fonts, and informative interviews (great for discovering typefaces).

I find WTF very useful. Sure, it's not perfect, and I continue to hope for better accuracy and results. I'm glad to hear they're working on it.

> Hey, that's not nice.

"Useless" is a bit strong, but the comment emphasizes the tool's most important limitation.

I might've said "Since WhatTheFont doesn't include fonts typically used on web sites, this tool is radically more effective when identifying fonts used in printed materials."

I'd like to understand if the team considers this to be a problem that they plan to solve, or if WhatTheFont will only identify fonts that they can monetize. (No judgement either way.)

Why not just say "we recognize this font but don't have the license/permission to tell you what it is?"

AFAIK Roboto has a very permissive licence, is this really a permission problem ?

MyFonts is my go-to source for fonts when I'm doing design work, and I understand why WTF is limited to MyFonts' database, but I do think it kind of cripples it and it would be really cool if it could identify external fonts by name but suggest a similar font in the catalog. Thanks for the great service you provide!

Is there an easy way I can add my font? It doesn't seem to know about it.

https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

Is your font on MyFonts?

I don't think so. Would the open-source license be a problem?

There's also this, which allows you to answer a series of questions to identify a font - very useful if you don't have a suitable image, e.g. only a photgraph of a sign or something like that.

http://www.identifont.com/

I ran through the online font identifier tools just a few days ago, doing a React exercise for a credit card component (dress it up with CSS!). I used Snipping Tool to take an image of the PDF image, and went looking for the font:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/erd4nuoavxun2rr/BigBankFont.PNG?dl...

I googled for free online font identification, and started testing. WhatTheFont completely chokes and returns zero candidates, even after moving the dot and the lower i into one glyph, identifying glyphs, etc. Next up, FontSquirrel Matcherator, which initially failed, though it at least showed candidates. I noticed that the FontSquirrel button was not on, so I clicked it and retested. At the top of the results was Fira Sans, oddly without any sample of the font. (hiding in plain site?) And it is Fira Sans, available on Google fonts. Font Squirrel uses the FontSpring Matcherator, so I tested at their site, and failed. No extra options to turn on to find Fira Sans.

Font Squirrel is now my favorite font site. And where is the site that runs these engines through all the Google fonts to see who is honest?

Wow, this was never featured on HN? I use WhatTheFont since ages, helped me a lot!

It was, you can get a history of submissions for a domain by clicking the domain name to the right of a HN article title.

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=myfonts.com

Didn't know that.

Looks like WTF was first submitted 3444 days ago -- nearly 10 years!

Check out WhatFont Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc...

I think it's 10 times more useful even though you’re not a designer/frontend type of a person and just curious about fonts that are shown in your browser. Obviously doesn’t do what WhatTheFont does, but I think it's a lot more practical.

WhatTheFont has been exactly the same since like 2009 if my memory serves correctly. So this is nothing new.

What's wrong with using Chrome's built-in Inspect?

Doesn't this predate Shazam? Isn't it more a case that Shazam is WhatTheFont for music?

Probably, if your criteria is date of establishment to make such a statement. I gander for most it’s instead popularity and ubiquity

It's a great program to write when you start learning machine learning, kinda like the next step to OCR.

Since it's hacker news just wondering what would be the best ML program to do it? Also as for datasets I think you can just download a huge ttf library from the net and write a program to render them into png files.

If you want to take it a step further: there's an app ([1]) that allows you to aim your smartphone camera at a sign, and it will identify the font, translate the sign to a different language, and edit the image with the translated text. All in real time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs

I'm not intimately familiar with this app, but I've used Google's version quite a few times. I don't think either really identifies the font much more than separating into a few different categories (e.g. serif vs sans). Not to mention, it struggles with more decorative typefaces.

That said, this tech has been around for years and I still think it's magic every time.

checking the description, I think it is now google translate.

Word Lens was actually introduced on HN a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014555

Shouldn't Shazam be the WhatTheFont for music?

It looks like Shazam [0] and WhatTheFont [1] [2] were both released around 1999. That said, Shazam's 1 billion + downloads indicate to me a success far greater than WhatThefont's.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfon...

[2] http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ (the copyright date)

Here is one that works for text on a page for webfonts, I find myself using it all the time: https://fount.artequalswork.com/

Since that page doesn't seem to be loading, here is a gist with the relevant bookmarklet. You click it once to turn on Fount, click a piece of text on the page, and it will show you in the top right the font-family, font-size, etc. (as it actually rendered on your machine vs. what the CSS says it should do):

https://gist.github.com/mvarrieur/444e8e45c31f241e5b37334d94...

Firefox devtools got this built in. Just inspect an element, select the Fonts-tab.

This has been around for ages.

17 years now: https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfon...

So really, Shazam is the WhatTheFont for music.

Correct, but in all honesty, I totally forgot about it.

To get latest technology app refer: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatthefont-2

Nothing new here… we’ve had this for almost a decade

Not the most effective tool, but it's the only on we got. I wish WhatTheFont got a neural network update.

Not completely unrelated: https://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts-using-de...

Hello everyone... this app has been around for many years but not DeepLearning. This app uses DeepLearning to predict the right font. Please give the app a try on real life cases and share your feedback again. We are in process of continuously improving the predictions.

Funny this was posted today, I literally just had this idea about an hour ago, after coming across https://reddit.com/r/identifythisfont

Glad to see the smart people aren't slacking in being smart.

This has been around for many, many years.

The mobile app has literally just been launched.

Re-launched maybe. I had the iOS apps years ago.

Right, but my point is that I had never heard of it until today, when I just happened to be thinking "why haven't I heard of this?" It was just serendipitous, that's all.

I used to use this and Identifont all the time when I worked in a print shop.

You wouldn't believe how many people would bring in a crap-quality printed copy of something and say "I want my invite/card/printout to look EXACTLY like this one". WhatTheFont saved the day many a time.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8402356

Their forum, especially the user "Tecnotronic", represents WhatTheFonts real value.

Tecnotronic is a machine. I don't think he sleeps, I haven't found a moment of the day when he isn't posting. I've done a fair number of IDs myself, but he's off the charts.

probably the news is the mobile app, not the site

https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8

I like to identify fonts in a web browser, say the font used on a particular site. I use a chrome app called WhatFont (chrome is the browser i use most). It does the Job,..at least till next year when chrome apps will die.

With Firefox, right click -> Inspect element, does the same thing

I'm a fan of the https://www.typesample.com/ bookmarklet.

I've been using this:

https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator

Meh... https://imgur.com/a/BSrL2 ;-)

Doubtful you would ever see bitmap fonts working here. MyFonts doesn’t usually sell bitmap fonts either.

Is there any kind of percentage match info? Like this is a 90% match or is it pretty binary?

It just gives you a list of possible matches, it's up to you to inspect them to see if any are accurate. A true match is more likely to be at the top of the list though.

Isn't this like 8 years old?

Sounds about right.

This is so old and rarely works.

It struggles with their own logo, which it reads as "4w"

Looks like a great machine learning problem.

Too bad it's not actually needed for websites since you can right click ;)

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