On the heels of WD Weems' lovingly crafted dissertation on fonts, I thought it might be time for another Creature Feature. The caveat to this blog post title is the same one we have to apply to every Creature Feature: "when it works". I first ran across WhatTheFont? when I was temping for a summer at a company that turns school- and company-written packets of dead trees into serviceable handbooks. We all remember getting the school handbooks/calendars every September, right? Those were the days -- never in my life have I seen so much wasted paper since. Anyway... The problem with mailed-in copies of hastily stapled manuscripts (aside from the obvious) is that we had to scan it and turn it into a Real Document(tm). Sometimes this involved font editing. We were unequivocally not allowed to change the font in any way -- what we got is what we got, period.
Enter WhatTheFont?. The first I heard of it, I was looking over my then-boss' shoulder as he matched a font for me, and in the fifteen-some-oddshortened tabs on his task bar, I saw something that looked like "WhatTheF...". Knowing my department's propensity for inappropriate humor (we were the nightshift, don't judge me!), I casually asked if he was involved in some sort of 12-year-old BNet kiddie AOL chat-group -- hint: WTF? doesn't, in fact, stand for "Where's the Fire?", and B.Net kiddies are the type of (usually young) wanna-be scripters who hack their way into Diablo battlenet to max out their character stats and gold for the ultimate in godliness while saying things like "lol nub" and "rofl kild u with my awsum sord", but I digress. The answer, however, was slightly less and yet alternatively even more exciting: WhatTheFont? The answer to all things font-puzzling.
Well, not all things. When you don't know what a font is, and you need to match it, you can either be a total hardcore font-freak and leaf through your entire bookshelf of font books and tab through your 10gigs of fonts on your computer, or you can hit up WhatTheFont? first. The way this program works is thusly:
First, scan or take a screenshot of the font in question, or if it's on a website, link the URL. The image can't be too big, just take a sentence snippet -- 50 characters or less. Upload it into the website at http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ and you will probably, but not always, get a screen that asks you to match certain characters taken from the image with their actual letters. You'll note that in severe cases -- much like the font used below in WD Weems' example -- it will read several characters at once as one full character. This can be a hassle, as it then makes it almost impossible to identify. (The fix to this requires a little time: in a paint program or Photoshop-like program of choice, single out various characters by drawing blank spaces around them to make them more readily identifiable as characters.)
Meanwhile, after entering the characters as requested, hit Search and you'll have one of two options: either scroll through the list of close fonts to find the one that matches yours, or take it to the WhatTheFont? Forums, where, as they say, a plethora of white-robed font-fanatics will be happy to help you in your search for font-perfection.
As written by Cameron Fraser -- a bloke who has something to do with the whole WhatTheFont? experience, I think -- good searching tips include:
- The number of characters in your scanned image makes a significant difference in the accuracy of the search results.
- Max components (characters): 50
- If you are identifying a font that is very similar to others:
- use as many characters as possible or a total of 25 and;
- use characters that are unique to this font
- If possible, space the characters apart more than normal
- Max image size is 400,000 pixels (width x height)
- ideal max. size of file containing NO descenders:
1666 x 120 pixels
- ideal max. size of file containing descenders:
1250 x 160 pixels
- Scan images at 300 dpi
- Best file format: Tiff, Grayscale, 300 dpi
The nice thing about the readily available font list is that you have the option of keeping your sample characters static on the screen as you scroll down. This cuts down on the back-and-forth comparison usually required of matching fonts. You know what I'm talking about: Scroll up, stare hard, note the little squiggle on the Q, scroll down and hope you don't forget that the squiggle kicks up at the left corner and not down and out at the right. (Ever wonder how people manage to ever get their faces straight when they're leafing through the pages and pages of individual features often given to crime victims for indentification? By the third page, a young man with a wide, flat nose has morphed into a pixy girl with an upturned nose and beetled-temples in my head, and the whole episode becomes a wash. Do they have WhatTheFace?)
The not-so-nice thing is that sometimes, on particularly complex fonts like Kyle's, WhatTheFont? and it's sister site, Identifont, can have problems discerning the difference between characters. This means that a trip to the forum will take slightly more time, but inevitably pay off. (By the way, a trip to the forum told me Kyle's font is called feast of Flesh -- mmmm, nummy!)
Et voila, if all goes right with the world, you have your font, which you can then search for at WhatTheFont?'s parent site (and buy) or, if you're like me, realize you already own the dang thing and had you spend two years cycling through all of your fonts in the first place, you could have found it on your own (what's wrong with you, anyway, too good for a little hard work and manual comparison? think of what your mother would say...)
What the font, anyway.
