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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.
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'
What The Font