Font recognition software

Question

Manytimes I come across bitmaps with nothing but text paragraphs, so I was looking for a software that can semi-automatically identify the font used, the para alignment, line spacing and color, bold, italics. Would an OCR package include such a tool?

Answer 1

I'm not certain if any OCR packages contain such a tool, but the web site WhatTheFont can at least (usually) identify the typeface for you. It won't handle whether or not it's bold, italic, any kind of alignment nor spacing, though, so this is only part of the way to your goals.

Ultimately, any tool that would seek to do this would need to have one heck of a typography database attached ... I doubt you'll find much out there that handles the entire wish list, but I'd love to be proven wrong about that.

Answer 2

Some OCR Packages do make guesses about which font is used. However OCR isn't perfect.

Answer 3

Of course there are also 2 "desktop" ways, I had the same problem as my clients have always sent me impossible artworks or they had a desire to add something in their "own" font. So I found two ways:

1. FontExpert 3.0 from fontexpert.de - but I am not sure if they sell this product anymore. It comes with its own database and it can also create database of your own fonts. It is tedious task as you need to first install all fonts and FontExpert would then examine each font and make its own database. Works perfect (read - really quick), you can choose almost all characters (at least English codepage, uppercase and lowercase) and numbers and gives you also search alternatives. It was fully justified its 199 € at the time I bought it (around 2004). Of course I still use it and I constantly add fonts to my collection. I have more than 70.000 fonts and seems that FontExpert has a limit of 10.000 fonts for such "private" font collections. So I just copy/paste in new folder complete program and I make new collection... Try on http://www.qbf.de/e/index.html as Quick Brown Fox GmbH was the author of the FontExpert and see if you can still get it. This is really a life saver as it will tell you immediately if you already have the font you are looking for.

2. FontMatch from stretchedout.com has similar functionality, but it does not create database, so it will search through all your fonts and as far as I could see on their webpage, the program works like that: it will load the font in memory, compare character and unload the font. This is something I would not do with my huge collection...

Hope you can find something useful from this...