If you are a bit of a font hoarder, welcome to the family. I am always looking for that next great font. When I find one I love, like Bebas Neue, you end up going back to it over and over like a nice, warm security blanket. So when I see an image that has an AMAZING font that I need to add to my collection (I feel like I need a Pokedex, but for fonts), I start asking anyone and everyone where they found it. That has all changed now.
FontSquirrel.com started out as a place to find free fonts (we actually reported on this site seven years ago), but now they have the Fontspring Matcherator which identifies text on an image and matches the font to the FontSquirrel.com database. I understand programming and I look at this thing as some kind of Internet magic. Honestly, I don’t even care how it works, it just does work.
How It Works
I recently created our Christmas cards and found a great image with a font marker kind of font that I wanted to use for the card. So I went over to FontSquirrel.com and uploaded the image. The web app does its magic and isolates the different entities. If needed, you can change the capture box to focus on one specific word. (This is important as you will be identifying every character to help the program.
From here, you will tag all of the characters on the images manually. Sometimes you do get lucky and the software finds the font matches instantly, but it may require a bit of work on your end. Of course, FontSquirrel has expanded beyond free fonts so you may get several fonts that cost money. If you loved it enough to do this much work and the font is not outside of your budget, go for it. (There are also free ones that may be similar too if you are a true cheapskate.)
So this is my little diamond in the rough. I’d love to hear what fonts you find because of this (mostly so I can expand my collection.)
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