Sometimes you find a particular font on a webpage or a magazine interesting and would like to use that yourself. But how are you going to lay your hands on it  if you don’t know the name of the font?

Whatthefont.com can help you here. What the font is a font recognition system that helps you identify a font. All you need to do is upload a scanned image or a screenshot of the font and Whatthefont will instantly find the closest matches in its database.

Instead of uploading an image you could also use the url to an already existing image on the web. WhatTheFont supports most common image formats, for example GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP. In the the font is in a paper publication, you could either scan the image or even a neat photograph with a digital camera would fetch good results.

Here are a few tips that can help you get accurate results.

• The number of characters in your scanned image makes a significant difference in the accuracy of the search results.
• Max components (characters): 50
• If you are identifying a font that is very similar to others:
• use as many characters as possible or a total of 25 and;
• use characters that are unique to this font
• If possible, space the characters apart more than normal
• Max image size is 400,000 pixels (width x height)
• ideal max. size of file containing NO descenders:1666 x 120 pixels
• ideal max. size of file containing descenders:1250 x 160 pixels
• Scan images at 300 dpi
• Best file format: Tiff, Grayscale, 300 dpi

Here are a few sample images that work well with Whatthefont.com.

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