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WhatTheFont – Shazam for Fonts
- rajatdeep 9y agoTo get latest technology app refer: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatthefont-2 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatthefont-2
- yoeriboven 9y agoThis has been around for ages.
- robin_reala 9y ago17 years now: https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfon...
- wanderingstan 9y agoSo really, Shazam is the WhatTheFont for music.
- softwareqrafter 9y agoCorrect, but in all honesty, I totally forgot about it.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoAFAIK 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.
- manyxcxi 9y agoI 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.
- lbotos 9y agoMy secret used to be http://www.typophile.com/ 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.
- OzzyB 9y ago> 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!
- mortenjorck 9y agoClearly 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.
- mung 9y agoI 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.
- gorkish 9y agoIt'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...
- weinzierl 9y ago> 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 https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator [2] https://www.whatfontis.com/ https://www.whatfontis.com/
- ehsankia 9y agoPersonally, 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/ http://www.identifont.com/ https://www.fonts.com/id/by-sight https://www.fonts.com/id/by-sight
- seahcb 9y agoGive the new mobile version a try. It's built on deep learning so it's more accurate: http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/ http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/
- sixothree 9y agoI 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.
- mikeleeorg 9y agoI've been using them a bunch for this little plaything https://javascriptbabybooks.com/ 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.
- foobar123456789 9y agoprobably the news is the mobile app, not the site https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 9y agoFunny this was posted today, I literally just had this idea about an hour ago, after coming across https://reddit.com/r/identifythisfont https://reddit.com/r/identifythisfont Glad to see the smart people aren't slacking in being smart.
- freshyill 9y agoThis has been around for many, many years.
- fredoliveira 9y agoThe mobile app has literally just been launched.
- gattilorenz 9y agoRe-launched maybe. I had the iOS apps years ago.
- nerdponx 9y agoRight, 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.
- bschne 9y agoThere'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/ http://www.identifont.com/
- seahcb 9y agoHey, 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/ 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.
- slig 9y agoWhy 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?
- seahcb 9y agoBecause we rolled out the mobile update first.
- yborg 9y agoAnd when will you be rolling out the desktop version?
- detritus 9y agoAbsolutely - 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.
- castis 9y agoShouldn't Shazam be the WhatTheFont for music?
- CamelCaseName 9y agoIt 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000818111401/https://www.myfon... [2] http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ (the copyright date)
- mvarrieur 9y agoHere is one that works for text on a page for webfonts, I find myself using it all the time: https://fount.artequalswork.com/ https://fount.artequalswork.com/
- mvarrieur 9y agoSince 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/444e8e45c31f241e5b37334d940c2c67 https://gist.github.com/mvarrieur/444e8e45c31f241e5b37334d94...
- maaaats 9y agoFirefox devtools got this built in. Just inspect an element, select the Fonts-tab.
- ronreiter 9y agoToo bad it's not actually needed for websites since you can right click ;)
- subbz 9y agoWow, this was never featured on HN? I use WhatTheFont since ages, helped me a lot!
- MrZeus 9y agoIt 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=myfonts.com
- wanderingstan 9y agoDidn't know that. Looks like WTF was first submitted 3444 days ago -- nearly 10 years!
- ElectronShak 9y agoI 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.
- lottin 9y agoWith Firefox, right click -> Inspect element, does the same thing
- MrJagil 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8402356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8402356 Their forum, especially the user "Tecnotronic", represents WhatTheFonts real value.
- mark-r 9y agoTecnotronic 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.
- rosseloh 9y agoI 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.
- brianbreslin 9y agoIsn't this like 8 years old?
- mproud 9y agoSounds about right.
- divanvisagie 9y agoIt struggles with their own logo, which it reads as "4w"
- rbanffy 9y agoMeh... https://imgur.com/a/BSrL2 https://imgur.com/a/BSrL2 ;-)
- mproud 9y agoDoubtful you would ever see bitmap fonts working here. MyFonts doesn’t usually sell bitmap fonts either.
- intoverflow2 9y agoDoesn't this predate Shazam? Isn't it more a case that Shazam is WhatTheFont for music?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoProbably, if your criteria is date of establishment to make such a statement. I gander for most it’s instead popularity and ubiquity
- moderation 9y agoI'm a fan of the https://www.typesample.com/ https://www.typesample.com/ bookmarklet.
- superasn 9y agoIt'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.
- amelius 9y agoIf 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs
- XaspR8d 9y agoI'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.
- zeratax 9y agochecking the description, I think it is now google translate.
- fractallyte 9y agoWord Lens was actually introduced on HN a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014555
- mproud 9y agoNothing new here… we’ve had this for almost a decade
- davidp670 9y agoIs there any kind of percentage match info? Like this is a 90% match or is it pretty binary?
- mark-r 9y agoIt 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.
- unabst 9y agoI've been using this: https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator
- digitalmaster 9y agoThis is so old and rarely works.
- tacon 9y agoI 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=0 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?
- alpb 9y agoCheck out WhatFont Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgcpjmedljpbcaablpmlmfcogm 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.
- mark-r 9y agoWhat's wrong with using Chrome's built-in Inspect?
- smpetrey 9y agoNot 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-deep-neural-networks.html https://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts-using-de...
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y agoLooks like a great machine learning problem.
- anandvijay619 9y agoHello 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.