Wonder Fonts

I was doing a collage with my son yesterday and cutting out letter from the news paper advertisements. I was telling him, who turns 8 tomorrow, that these are called fonts and he quickly said, “I know!”. Followed it with, “I have seen it on MS Paint.”. But he asked, “How do know which font this is?”.

What the heck, how do I know a font? Ya really, how do I know? How the hell do I know the font type of all those print ads that I see? Do many all these beautiful fonts on all these ads, adhere to copyrights(or copylefts)?

Well of course there should be an intelligent system when submitted with a font’s photograph, knows and tells what font that is? Of the many from the search one seemed to be promising, what MyFonts website had here.

So I decided to check it out, and I put the following images of fonts to test.

The first font one is Maze Font, second one is Sans Serious and third font is Sanelma.

I put all the three through their Image to Font detection mechanism, and was disappointed with the results. It so happens that the first two fonts are not listed to on MyFonts, but the third one Sanelma is, and to add more pepper, it is listed on their “Hot New Fonts”. Nothing against the MyFonts here. I would give it to MyFonts for finding the following Contacta font, besides it being very cryptic.

So whats the point? #

There needs to be a more robust mechanisms of finding font types, independent of the font enlisters. There service needs to allow users to upload images of text in whatever form, and from whereever. The service should scan the image for the text and decipher the font, and lists the font’s meta information.

Take it a little further and allow the user to intimate the developer of the font’s usage. This would allow for the copyright violation reporting to be crowdsourced, in case of violations. I presume there is abundance of violating font licenses.