Thursday, September 20, 2012

Things They Should Invent: WhichFontIsThis.com

I've been making very good use of Google's reverse image search function lately.  It comes in handy not only when people post unsourced  funny photos whose backstory I'm curious about, it's also useful for my work.  If a text to be translated includes an uneditable diagram of some commonly used model or schema (like Maslow's pyramid or that circly thing from Six Sigma), I can sometimes run it through reverse image search and find an English equivalent that I can then paste into the document I'm translating. Plus, every once in a while, (this function is still rudimentary) I can run a picture through it to find out what the thing in the picture is called, which comes in handy for things like mechanical parts where you can translate them without fully understanding as long as you have the correct terminology.

I'd like someone to invent the same thing for fonts.

Sometimes I receive texts that are faxed or scanned.  I'm supposed to duplicate the formatting of the original down to the font, but I can't always recognize which font is being used.  When I'm translating a powerpoint with an uneditable diagram that contains texts, I sometimes put textboxes over the text in the diagram and type my own translations in there.  However, if I can't tell which font is being used in the original, I can't duplicate the exact look.

I'd like to be able to input an image of some text, and have the computer tell me which font it's written in.  OCR technology can already recognize all different fonts.  Maybe they could reverse that somehow to tell me which font it's recognizing?

4 comments:

OneWiseKiwi said...

Oh God I would so use this!!!

M@ said...

They have invented this! Google "font recognition". Some of the first couple of tools:

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

http://www.whatfontis.com/

impudent strumpet said...

OMG, that's awesome!!!

laura k said...

I was about to post... but M@ already did it.

I read your post and thought, no way this doesn't exist.