Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? | Hacker News Reader

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?

myfonts.com

42 pointsMrJagil24 comments

WhatTheFont is a good resource. Identifont is another one that helps you narrow things down on your own, though the results can be spotty at times.

http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/font...

I'm active on this part of the site, and I see most questions get answered in some way. If you like the Stack Overflow format, it's a great way to get help. The tag wiki has a lot of resources to check out apart from the SE site itself.

As an aside, it's interesting that the Sci-Fi Stack Exchange has a lot of questions pertaining to "Story Identification" - a similar concept in a different genre of knowledge. Cool to see sites out there where experts hang out and beginners can get help.

Amazing service, they have a forum too[1] where I got my two requests handled immediately and very correctly [2] (both by the user Tectronic).

[1] https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/forum/ [2] Neutraface was one of them. Very interesting font: http://www.houseind.com/fonts/neutraface

I hear it's a good font to use for invoices... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHCu28bfxSI

Tecnotronic only appeared on the site a couple of years ago, but now he seems to do about 80% of the forum IDs. I don't know how he finds time to sleep or earn a living.

Gotta agree with you on Neutraface.

I emailed them to ask if their "K&R!" example was a reference to the authors of "The C Programming Language". They said their designer chose it, and it probably wasn't. I was disappointed.

If you're a Safari user and tired of inspecting to find text fonts... https://github.com/phallstrom/SafariFontScope

If you are a Firefox user:

Font Finder https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-finder/

If you are a chrome user

What Font https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc...

http://typophile.com/fontid

MyFonts' contraption is nice in theory, but in practice the process tends to get cumbersome and it's prone to mis-detection. It also managed to loop on me once :)

In comparison, TypeID board is absolutely incredible if not for the answer but for the amazing depth of knowledge that people who hang around there have. It's not uncommon to get an ID in a matter of minutes for the most obscure sample.

WhatTheFont is a pretty good tool but it only works well when there's high contrast. Black on white, or white on black is the only way to get it to work well.

If you geek out on fonts, then you'll find the iOS app pretty fun. It's not perfect, but you'll impress all your designer friends if they aren't familiar with it. http://bit.ly/1vBCCsL

There's also this oldie-but-goodie: http://www.identifont.com/

I haven't found it to be terribly useful - you answer your 20 questions and are given a long list of possible matches, and if you're extremely lucky the font might be somewhere in the list. The MyFonts approach is much nicer, working directly with an image of the characters with the forum as a backup.

I used it just the other day, with success. I had a font sample that was small, only two uppercase and six lowercase letters. I had to answer "don't know" to most of the questions but it kept going and found the exact font I was looikng for.

I work for Monotype, the owner of myFonts, and I can assure you we have more amazing things in store for WhatTheFont and beyond. :)

Here's another tip: If you want to know the fonts used in a PDF, you can use the pdffonts utility from poppler.

If you're using Adobe Reader: File > Properties > Fonts > Fonts Used in this Document

Once you know what font it is, find the closest google font with this:

http://joelcrawfordsmith.com/new/

Your tool does not accept https URLs. WTF indeed.

Edit: I tried submitting the Google logo (https://www.google.se/images/srpr/logo11w.png over http) and it could not find the font for it. Also, the logo ended up looking very weird, I guess it does not support transparency. Nice idea but not quite there yet.

Nice idea but not quite there yet.

I've been using that site for at least 7-8 years, so if it's not there, I'm not sure it'll ever be unless they redevelop it ;-) I think a big part of the problem is the letters aren't separated enough, I've had to edit images to break letters apart more before for it to work. When it does work it's pretty cool though.

These two bugs are extremely basic stuff one would find in the most alpha of alphas. If it's been there for 7-8 years, something is either massively wrong with it or development on it is dead (which makes it kind of .. useless, imho)

I've been using it for just about a decade; if you recall, us designers basically didn't use transparency on the web except when absolutely necessary because of IE, and even then it was often in GIFs (which you wouldn't use for type) to save the grief of a client seeing an improperly rendered PNG. Anyway, I always just uploaded a screengrab of what I wanted anyway.

I'd love to see it improved in every way, but calling it 'useless' because of such a silly bug is... silly.

I've also been using it for almost a decade. I usually have to: + find the largest source version of the font in question. common logos are frequently available in vector format (I'm assuming you're using the service because the font itself has been outlined; you'd have no use for it if the font is either embedded or referenced). if bitmap, use google image search to find the largest size. + create a high contrast version. if vector, simply open in a vector editing app and make the text black if it isn't already, and remove any background. if bitmap, open in bitmap editor and manipulate image via channel editing or using levels, curves, or other method. + edit in vector or bitmap app to remove any overlaps. + save to highest quality JPEG and upload to what the font. + use what the font's drag functionality to combine letterforms that it (ridiculously) doesn't automatically detect such as "i". + hope for the best.

I wouldn't disagree with most of that, except for it being useless, it's janky but give it what it wants and the results are generally good. A bit like an old car I guess ;-)

It is not my tool (in the sense that I didn't make it). Also, consider submitting your picture to the forum. Wrote about in another post below.

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