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Student Makes 'Shazam For Fonts', a Gadget That Detects Fonts and Captures Colors (theverge.com)
Imagine being able to use a miniature device which could quickly tell you the kind of font you're looking at in a book, and also tell you about its color. Fiona O'Leary, a student at the Royal College of Art, has developed exactly that kind of device, and she is calling it Spector. The device, which is in its prototype phase, also saves the font type information and loads the data on Adobe InDesign. The Verge reports: If she loved the font London uses on its subway maps, for instance, she could use this device to capture that font and load it into Adobe InDesign. Spector takes a photo of the font and uses an algorithm to translate that image into information about the shape of letters and symbols. It then cross-references that information with a font database to correctly identify it. The Spector also captures colors and breaks them down into CMYK/RGB values.
What's next a student who invents a Shazam for music?
An "algorithm"!
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. - Bob Dylan "Subteranean Homesick Blue
WhatTheFont can look at font text and tell you what it is.
Taking an existing color and converting it to RGB or CMYK is what any hardware store that will color-match paint to a sample has been doing for years.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This doesn't seem possible to do accurately through a cellphone camera without some other lighting and/or color reference being present. Lighting color temperature is an obvious place that this could be thrown off, as well as other difficult-to-control variables such as light intensity, shadows, sheen, and numerous other factors that could skew the colors as recorded on a digital camera.
To say nothing of any processing the camera itself does upstream of passing the image off to the app (for example, an auto-white-balance or color correction).
Capturing color reliably is a challenge under controlled conditions. Off a cell phone camera? I wouldn't bank on it.
Are the Fontspring matcherator and the Fontsquirrel matherator the same thing?
Whatfontis ?
Identitfyfont?
Here's a list of seven more microaggressions.
So she uploads a photo to WhatTheFont using the api they provide for doing just that, and then pulls the RGB values from the not-in-anyway-colour-calibrated image and converts them to CMYK.
Fucking groundbreaking.
What has the world come to.
Just in case you were wondering: Fiona means "white" and "O'Leary" means "keeper of the calves." Carry on.
Google actually has a tool to do just that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm itchin' to try it on the ol' Wingding font
Table-ized A.I.
It can identify 7 font families and....
So like the tabs on the fonts website that has 1000 entries under each family?
Pretty sure even I can guess the family. Does the other info actually help you pick one of those 1000 choices?
Some people (big companies) get all bent out of shape if you rip off their font without a license to do so.
...that not too long from now if this does go into mass production that the Government and CSI Organizations will use this technology to match handwriting samples at the touch of a button. Note: My comment my be misplaced as I do not keep up with CSI Field Technologies.
For a minute I thought it was 1998 all over again. Maybe this student wasn't born when the idea was first crrated (and hasn't heard of Google)
Seriously? A dedicated device for this? In 2016? It should just be a smartphone app. No need for separate hardware.
Lame.
Somebody attended Adobe MAX last year and watched the Sneaks...
https://youtu.be/5eJ3IXYcw3M
Adobe is already working on adding this functionality to Photoshop and integrating with TypeKit. Of course that would also include color selection (to a MUCH greater extent) and integration with every other Adobe app, including InDesign.
Many countries offer design registration that confers exclusive rights in a typeface for a term between 14 years (United States) and 25 years (Great Britain). But you're correct that after this expires, it becomes legal to launder the typeface a font with the print-scan-trace method, so long as you A. don't refer to the original font's control points in your trace and B. don't use a similar name for your font. Instead derive the control points from the rules set forth in the "Digitizing" chapter of Apple's TrueType Reference Manual : one on-curve point on every corner, vertical or horizontal tangent, point of inflection, or large change in curvature, and at least one intermediate point every 45 degrees. Then the off-curve point between each pair of on-curve points goes at the intersection of the lines tangent to those points.
There are several smartphone apps, Color Grab being one of them, that let you identify colors at any distance, no extra hardware required. Btw. I suspect the video to be faked. It would require very advanced AI to recognize any font instantly. Usually you have to guide the software by identifying some of the characters before a match is trying to be found.
Seriously? CorelDRAW has been able to vectorize images and make fonts out of them since the 1980's. Maybe this is "amazing" because it's a phone app... OMG PONIES!
or you have a refence colour in shot, your RGB values are completely fucking meaningless
Where is the OCR software that first identifies the font, then reconstructs the text until it's pixel perfect? I recently evaluated a selection of current OCR software and was most disappointed to see how little progress has been made in the last decade.
But can this gadget accurately determine what font SpaceX uses for it's on-screen telemetry display? I've tried this several times using several online recognizers and none of them get it right.
This must be made a specific instance of a general object recognition. With AI and image recognition seen great progress in the last 4 or 5 years, sending a picture to the backend should give all details of it. [eg send a pic of a flower, it should tell me what it is]
Sadly, unless you spring for the premium version, it will say every font is Comic Sans.