jciv’s blog

Font Matching

May 26th, 2006

I have been doing some more graphic editing. This time placing my cousin’s face in the poster for one of her favorite old movies. To go a bit further, I then started looking for the font used so I could match it and add her name. The first place I tried was Identifont, there you answer questions about characteristics of the font and it narrows down its database. The second place I tried was WhatTheFont, with this site you send in an image and it attempts to find the most similar font in its apparently much larger database.

The first site gave me 30 possible results, with the first being Arial. That greatly lowered my expectations of success. Based on the questions I answered, Arial is similar but not close to what I wanted. Some of the rest were much closer and finally I found one that looks to be a close relative if not a perfect match.

But just to make sure, I ran the font by WhatTheFont and got five possible results. All were similar, but none were as good a match as Identifont had given me. I was a bit surprised.

The trouble now that I found the font is they aren’t cheep. I don’t think this project is worth spending $49 on a font. I will have to dig through my old font disks and see if I have something similar or maybe I will get lucky and already have it. Years ago I used to collect fonts, I had so many I was choking Windows 3.1 with them. That was until I learned how just having too many fonts takes a lot of memory and slows Windows.

Entry Filed under: computer