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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.

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  1. Re:Fiona O'Leary ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Fiona means "white" and "O'Leary" means "keeper of the calves."

    Fiona means parents care enough about being respectable in Ireland to give her an Irish name, but are not secure enough to give here the more upper class (and abroad unpronounceable) "Saoirse". "O'Leary" means that the family have not yet married into a high enough status clan to afford a double barrelled, post independence gaelcised name like "McDonagh-Ã" FaolÃin".

    This necessitated sending the child abroad for better qualifications, though clearly enough money and influence has been gained in the meantime to afford a promotional media story, which points to a guilded future on return to Dublin, likely running a studio with several lucrative multi-million euro projects designing fonts and logos for Government Quangos and occasionally appearing at race meetings.

    IMHO