WhatTheFont has been around for years, and it’s a go-to choice for identifying fonts. But if you haven’t used WhatTheFont recently, you should definitely take another look. The new version of WhatTheFont allows you to upload images from your browser or iPhone app and have the online service on MyFonts.com do the analysis for you.

See a font you like at a local restuarant? Snap its picture and upload it to WhatTheFont. You’ll get back a WYSIWYG list of potential matches that give you font clarity fast. Instead of going home from dinner feeling empty, you can stay for dessert and celebrate your newfound font.

So font lovers rejoice. The latest version of WhatTheFont makes it simple to identify your favorite fonts. Give it a try… and then have dessert.

Simple and Fun Way to Identify Fonts

WhatTheFont is surprisingly simple to use. Here’s what you need to do to get in on the fun…

First, use your mobile phone or digital camera to take a picture of the type in question. For this example, we’re using a window sign for Michelle’s, a coffee shop that caught our eye and tastebuds.

We could upload the image as is, but because there is a lot of background “noise” behind the type we are going to clean up the image a bit in Photoshop. According to the WhatTheFont tips page, the preferred image type is a greyscale tiff. So we selected the type using Photoshop’s magic wand tool and filled the selection with black, and then selected the inverse and filled that area with white to get the image below:

Now we have an image that is ready to upload to WhatTheFont. To get to the page to upload the image click here.

After we uploaded the file (you can also just specify a URL for the file), we click Continue and proceed to the character selection page. In a lot of cases, WhatTheFont already can tell what a character is, but where there is some doubt, it asks us to identify various letters.

If an image does not contain a valid character, just leave the text box blank.

After identifying all the characters, we continue to the results page where we find that WhatTheFont has found five possible matches, all of which look acceptable.

Call on the Community for Help

If WhatTheFont does not find a satisfactory match you can take your case to the WhatTheFont Forum where you can have your font evaluated by font geeks from all over the world, or try Identifont which can help you find a matching font by answering a series of questions about the letter shapes in the typeface you wish to identify.

So the next time you are in a restaurant and can’t eat because the font on the menu or front door is driving you crazy, just take its picture and have some dessert. The tools and community you need to find fascinating fonts are online waiting for you to finish that crème brûlée.

Download the iPhone Version of WhatTheFont

Interested in seeing how the iPhone version of WhatThe Font works? Just download the app and try it yourself!

For more information about tools to help you manage and preview your fonts, go to www.insidersoftware.com.

How TypeTrax Works
As designers import InDesign projects into Cumulus, TypeTrax automatically imports all the fonts and files required. Users can preview fonts and their metadata with a few clicks. When users check-in an InDesign project, Cumulus and TypeTrax automatically preflight the job to ensure that all required fonts, images and resource files are included. TypeTrax detects differences between fonts resident in projects and on users’ systems. In addition, users can track all checked-in revisions, so they can easily revert to an earlier version of a project.

What It Takes to Get Started with TypeTrax
TypeTrax for Cumulus 8 is available immediately and includes a copy of FontAgent Pro 4. TypeTrax requires an Apple Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (Tiger) or later and Adobe InDesign Creative Suite 4, as well as access to a server running Canto Cumulus 8.0 or 8.1.

A TypeTrax server license costs USD $1,995 and includes three user licenses. Additional user licenses cost $195 each. It is available for purchase from Insider and Moksa, as well as from Canto and selected Canto resellers worldwide.

AppleScript is an English-like language you can use to write scripts that automate the actions of your Mac and the applications that run on it. When you want your Mac applications to work together in harmony, AppleScript becomes the lingua franca that makes them all talk to each other. Using it, you and your applications become a lot more productive.

If your project workflow uses fonts, FontAgent Pro is the font management tool you need to automate your workflow. While old versions of Suitcase supported AppleScript, the current versions of Extensis Suitcase Fusion 2 and Extensis Universal Type Server (UTS) client do not, nor does FontExplorer X.

How you can use AppleScript

There are lots of things you can automate with FontAgent Pro scripts. One of the most useful scripts imports and activates fonts when you drag a folder of fonts onto an AppleScript application.

Here is an example of how this might be useful:

It is common for prepress service providers to receive many different jobs from different clients during the day. Service providers usually receive fonts in a Package or in a folder created by a Collect for Output command. These fonts need to be imported into FontAgent Pro and activated to open the application file in the project.

Using AppleScript and FontAgent Pro, you can create a droplet application where you can drag the folder of files provided by a client (which in this example is named by job number) and the fonts contained will be automatically imported into a unique library with the same name as the folder. The script also deactivates all other fonts, and then activates the library you just imported so you can be sure you are using the exact fonts provided by the client. Without doing this, you cannot be sure that the job will rip and print as expected. After running this script, you are ready to launch whatever application your client used to create the application file and proceed.

If you just want to get the script and start rolling, you can download it here and unzip it on your desktop and you are good to go.

The script is provided as is, but if you have any questions or suggestions, you can contact us at Insider Technical Support.

The script

The text for the script is below:

If you copy and paste the text into Script Editor, you may get a syntax error when you attempt to compile the script. This is most likely because the quotation marks in the text are smart quotation marks or curly quotes as opposed to the straight dumb quotation marks. Just do a find-and-replace with the dumb quotes and you can edit the script from there, or just download the script from the link provided above.

How to use the script

Simply take a folder of fonts and give it a name. This example uses a folder created from a package-for-output InDesign CS 4 project, and it’s named with a five-digit project number.

Drag the folder onto the FAPDragActivator icon on your desktop and let the script do its stuff.

From the screenshot below, you can see that the fonts were imported into FontAgent Pro (in a library named after the folder) and are indicated active with a green activation sphere. Also notice all the other fonts in the collection are deactivated.

The fun doesn’t have to stop here. This script can be integrated into a larger script that further automates your workflow. This script could activate the fonts and could hand the document off to InDesign or QuarkXpress to print a soft proof using a preset print setting.

In future posts we will talk more about using AppleScript to automate font-related workflows. Stay tuned to the Insider Blog.