They were down for a while so I don't know if that community re-formed or not.
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.
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!
I was wondering if that is what inspired this thread, the threat of Adobe.
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.
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.
But a tweet to Postman reveals they use Cuisine, which is a very pretty font.
It's powered by deep learning, and it's way better and more accurate than the current desktop version that's linked here.
I'm certainly not going to start taking photos of my monitor here, anyway!
Odd.
Does it struggle with photos of screens in particular?
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.
That said, this tech has been around for years and I still think it's magic every time.
Glad to see the smart people aren't slacking in being smart.
Looks like WTF was first submitted 3444 days ago -- nearly 10 years!
https://gist.github.com/mvarrieur/444e8e45c31f241e5b37334d94...
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.
[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)
Their forum, especially the user "Tecnotronic", represents WhatTheFonts real value.
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?
Not completely unrelated: https://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts-using-de...
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.
https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8
