WTF?
Category: Design...
Posted Friday, February 10, 2006 at 10:23 PM [GMT-6]

No, it's not even my acronym, it stands for "What The Font?" and it's very cool. It's the free font identification tool found on the MyFonts.com website.

Simply browse to a scan of a text sample or an image from a website (either stored on your hard drive or an uploaded URL) and WTF will process it and provide you with some possible matches for the font used in the sample. I used Photoshop to create four test images (in JPEG format) and WTF correctly identified three of them (the fourth was a font named "Haettenschweiler" that I didn't even know I had and which I've never used; WTF didn't recognize it, but provided several very closely matching alternatives). It did recognize Copperplate, Skia and Mistral...putting each one at the top of the list of potential matches and alternatives.

This one's worth bookmarking.

Tip o'the hat to Gervase over at Hacking for Christ.

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Comments

WTF does have what seems to be a deliberately designed limitation, though.

The times I've used it, it always seems to identify matches only with commercial fonts and not the many nearly identical free and shareware fonts out there.

That's not surprising because somebody has to be paying the bills for that site and it's probably the font foundries who get the referrals.

Posted by: Mr. Freen at February 11, 2006 10:42 AM

very cool. Sure I will use that next week.

Posted by: shannon at February 11, 2006 10:50 AM

Unbelievable! You are the font wonk and you've never used "Haettenschweiler." I'm amazed.

I'm sure we'll start to see it pop up all over the place now.

Posted by: Jim at February 11, 2006 06:16 PM

Mr. Freen, do those limitations really surprise you? I mean, anybody with a copy of Fontographer can create their own fonts and upload them to a website. I wouldn't expect a free service to try to find and catalog all of them.

I do have my doubts about the practicality of this tool, the more I think about it. A lot of the fonts I see that I'd like to know more about are not in a format that's easily captured in a file that can be scanned by WTF.

Jim, I think someone's been sneaking into my house at night and loading strange fonts onto my computer. I hate it when that happens.

Posted by: Eric at February 11, 2006 09:03 PM
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