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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?

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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.

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+1 for WhatTheFont. It's pretty accurate, and works better the larger and clearer your source text is. – EvilChookie Aug 3 '09 at 20:12
+1 on WhatTheFont. I've used it to find a number of fonts I didn't know the name for, and it works well with a limited number of characters too (I've gotten the right answer with even 2 characters!) – jamuraa Aug 4 '09 at 2:20
WhatTheFont is great – Petruza May 23 '11 at 17:09
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Some OCR Packages do make guesses about which font is used. However OCR isn't perfect.

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There is also another desktop solution: "Find my Font" - http://www.findmyfont.com (I'm the designer of this solution)

  • It creates a database of all your local PC fonts (installed or not).
  • It creates a index on this database: Recognition Speed is about 5.000.000 fonts/min
  • At this speed you can search a database of 200-300.000 fonts in about 10-20 secs
  • You can recognize fonts that are artificially made Bold / Italic / Expanded / Condensed
  • You can horizontalize the image text or split connected script letters
  • You can select color letters out of color background without external image processing
  • The current version (3.0) can match also fonts you don't have in your computer, using a link to an external matching database of 40.000+ fonts

You can download a 30-Days-Trial to check it out: It has a limit of 900 local fonts and full access to the online matching database.

I know that the original question is old, but maybe my answer could be useful to future readers.

Cheers

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You shouldn't have mentioned that you made it! You are bound to get your answer deleted as spam. – paradroid May 9 at 3:12
I'm a man of honor and I just try to be honest and give all the information required for a future reader to evaluate my answer. – Fivos May 9 at 3:15
Well, I presonally have nothing against it; it's just that it against the rules of this network, as far as I understand it, and you can imagine where it could lead if this was allowed. – paradroid May 9 at 3:21
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@paradroid: You're the only one advocating a violation of the ToS here. Disclosure is exactly what's required. A for-profit solution which is relevant and actually solves the exact question asked is not considered spam, as long as the answerer's relationship is fully disclosed. – Ben Voigt May 9 at 4:15
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@paradroid: Well, I'm more experienced on SO than other trilogy sites, and exactly what's allowed varies somewhat. But I only see it being a problem if either (1) the product isn't really a good fit for the question, or (2) the question specifically asked for free or open source, and the product isn't. Disclosure is mandatory of course, but it's sometimes hard to tell when a disclosure is missing (I tend to demand that answers state what the financial relationship is, even if there is none, e.g. "happy customer" or "read about it somewhere") – Ben Voigt May 9 at 5:02
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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...

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