I’m sure it happened to everyone at least once to see a nice font text, and to want to have it or know what its name was. The results of Googling font names and trying to guess a match are never as good as that original font. I’ve tried making my own versions with some font editors, but that is just frustrating and pointless. And the more so in comparison with WhatFontIs, a font detecting service with a database that surpasses 285,000 font models. The way it works is very simple: you upload an image of a text, and it detects that certain font, provided it contains it. And given the database size, it would be strange not to.
The website is very simple and straightforward, and once you’re on its homepage, all you have to do is click the browse button to upload the image (you can also insert a URL). It is important that the writing is in horizontal position and that the image has good contrast, otherwise editing the image a bit would do the trick.
After choosing the contrast type (background lighter or darker than the font), pressing “continue” will take you to the next page, which shows you the identified letters. As stated in the requirements section, it is important that the letters don’t touch one another. Sometimes, due to certain characters’ flamboyant shape, two letters can pass as one, and the detector can be biased. This tends to happen especially with handwriting fonts and other complex shapes. In this case, you will have to leave the “activate the checkbox for images with more components per letter” unticked.
The result screen will display a list of fonts ordered by descending similarity.
WhatFontIs can be used for free, but there is a premium section as well, which costs as little as $9.99 per year. In my view, this is quite worth it, especially if you work with fonts a lot and if you don’t want to be bothered with ads. Additionally, Premium users can input 1 to 15 characters when searching (as opposed to the normal 2 to 10) and are able to select sources for commercial fonts. Lastly, there is no daily identification limit.
WhatFontis falls in that category of services that everybody feels the need for, and when they come out it seems groundbreaking, like softwares similar to Shazam. Things we all thought about but couldn’t put it from the tip of our tongue into our computer chips. And the fact that it has a lot of free fonts ensures its accessibility.
You can try it for yourself here.
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