Have you heard of the What The Font tool, from the My Fonts website? This useful font identification tool is located at www.MyFonts.com/WhatTheFont.
Have you ever seen an attractive logo or heading on a website and wondered what the font is? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some convenient font identification tool or font finder tool that you could use? The My Fonts website provides just such a tool.
It is a website that was set up by BitStream Inc, a type foundry located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. It is one of the oldest font designers in existence today. Bitstream has a large library of classic and new fonts, which it licenses out to companies for inclusion in their software products, such as CorelDraw and Adobe Photoshop. The fonts are also sold to artists and designers for use on websites, pictures and logos. The myFonts.com website was set up by Bitstream to sell fonts mainly to small users for use in artwork and design work. To help users identify and locate the fonts they would like to purchase, the website has provided the WhatTheFont tool.
What can you do with the WhatTheFont tool? With this tool, you can recognize the font used in a piece of text. First, do a screen capture of the website where you found the text. If the text in question is on paper, you can scan the text with a scanner. Save the image as a grayscale TIFF file, although JPEG files will also work. For best results, include at least 30 characters with good mix of letters, preferably with some letters with descending strokes, such as the letters “g” and “j”. Ensure that the image resolution is high enough so that the letters are well-separated and at least 100 pixels tall, and the thin letter strokes are represented by at least several pixels. A resolution of 300 dpi is usually sufficient for scanned images. Also, it is important that the letters are approximately horizontal, so that the type engine can properly recognize the letters.
Once the image file has been properly prepared, go to the www.MyFonts.com/WhatTheFont website and upload the image file. Then, you will be asked to identify the characters contained within the uploaded image. A maximum of 50 characters will be queried and submitted to the type engine. After this, the site will tell you what font the letters are in. If there is no exact match to the letters, the site will tell you what font in its library come closest to the supplied image, and you can see for yourself whether it is an adequate replacement.
To find out what font an attractive website is in, go to www.MyFonts.com/WhatTheFont to use the What The Font tool.