WhatThe­Font, a great tool to check a font from an bitmap image. For years the tools is to be found online at myfonts. I have used this tool many times before and was won­der­ing if it will become avail­able for iPhone. From Jan­u­ary 2009 this tool is released for iPhone users and now you can take a photo and iden­tify the font using this new iPhone App.

WhatThe­Font iPhone App

This is a review of WhatThe­Font for iPhone App, I will go into every step of iden­ti­fy­ing a font using this App & a iPhone. I will try to get the results as stated from the myFonts web­site: Iden­tify the fonts in a photo or web graphic! .

Ever seen a great font in a mag­a­zine ad, poster, or on the web and won­dered what font it is? Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatThe­Font for iPhone will iden­tify that font in seconds!

WhatThe­Font iPhone App is free avail­able from the iPhone store cre­ated by myFonts.

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Let’s get started!

Down­loaded the tool into my iPhone and started the pro­gram, as you can see in the splash screen there are two options. One is to take a new photo or you can select a photo from your photo-roll in your iPhone. I selected the first option and took a new photo of the Apple Air­port box. When tak­ing a photo use the fol­low­ing tips from myFonts:

• WhatThe­Font works best with just a few, large let­ters. Keep the text to fewer than 20 characters.
• Try to get the text as close to hor­i­zon­tal as pos­si­ble. (Pretty hard to man­age with an iPhone)
• Avoid con­nected let­ters (as in logo’s or cur­sive handwriting)
• A well-lit, uniform-color back­ground works the best

With this Air­port exam­ple I adapted the above steps and started work­ing with the photo and selected use photo. Now I am able to use my fin­gers onto the photo to draw a box around the text. At first it seems pretty hard to get a good box around the text, but after some expe­ri­ence it worked bet­ter and bet­ters. You can also rotate the photo by rotat­ing your iPhone, I found this not very help­ful and I would sug­gest to take the photo in a stand­ing up posi­tion. When you have selected the desired text to iden­tify hit the right top cor­ner Upload. The App is upload­ing the cropped image to myFonts to iden­tify the font.

Check Char­ac­ters

In this step of iden­ti­fy­ing a font you can see the results of WhatThe­Fonts char­ac­ter guess­ing. The App shows you every sin­gle let­ter of the selected text and you are able to remove char­ac­ters from iden­ti­fy­ing by select­ing the red icon left from the letter.

Some char­ac­ters such as the let­ters i WhatThe­Font sep­a­rates the stroke from the dot. You can merge these two images for bet­ters results in iden­ti­fy­ing the font. This needs some prac­tice, try select­ing two images with two fin­gers, the boxes turn grey and you are able to move them towards each other, the tool then merges the let­ters and you only need to fill in the cor­rect let­ter in the right box. Hit the box and the type-in screen appears.

When you are done mod­i­fy­ing and insert­ing miss­ing char­ac­ters hit Iden­tify! and the right top cor­ner. The App com­mu­ni­cates with myFonts and presents you with the results.

Font Iden­ti­fied!

The font is rec­og­nized! In this case the font Myriad-Pro Semi­bold is found as to match, fur­ther on var­i­ous other close fonts are men­tioned for you to pick the per­fect match with the taken photo. I have run this exam­ple a few times, 3 times out of 4 it gave this results, not bad in my opinion.

When select­ing the iden­ti­fied font you are pre­sented with two options: One send an email con­tain­ing a link to the myFonts web­site or you can open the link on your iPhone with Safari browser. The most pow­er­ful option (for me) is send­ing a link by email, this way I can check the typeface

Vis­it­ing the myFonts web­site allows you to buy and see all the font details.

My find­ings

I sim­ply love this tool for my iPhone, it gives me free­dom to take shots where ever I am and quickly find out which font it is. A few details that I don’t like about this tool:

• When first installed the App crashed many times, I needed to clear the iPhone mem­ory by a hard­ware restart in order to make this tool work better.
• Tak­ing a hor­i­zon­tal shot of text is not very easy and the let­ters on the pho­tos are quickly a bit blur, so WhatThe­Font can­not rec­og­nize the font. I know this is partly due the low qual­ity cam­era in the iPhone.
• Indoor shots are not always rec­og­nized cor­rectly due the low con­trast background.

My Sug­ges­tions for WhatThe­Font iPhone App

WhatThe­Font for iPhone is cur­rently in ver­sion 1.0, I have some sug­ges­tions to improve this tool and make it even more useful:

• In the crop image selec­tion should be these two options: a con­trast slider to get a bet­ter sep­a­ra­tion between text and back­ground and the option to sharpen the image. I believe with these two options you will have bet­ter results in iden­ti­fy­ing the fonts. Even bet­ter would be a func­tion to apply an auto adjust­ment to the cropped text (like in Fireworks/Photoshop). I used the iPhone App Pho­tona­sis Lite to enhance pho­tos for bet­ter recognition.
• Add more sep­a­ra­tion in boxes at the Check Chars step, when try­ing to delete char­ac­ters I kept hit­ting the wrong box and got the typescreen.
• Use a time­stamp and Google maps loca­tion when send­ing a link by email, this way I will know when and where I was when I saw that par­tic­u­lar font.
• When a font is not rec­og­nized use a option to send the image to the WhatThe­Font forum to find out if any­body else could help me find­ing out what font it is.

Require­ments and information

• For iPhone and iPod Touch with the lat­est firmware update. With the iPhone you can take pho­tos and use them in the tool, for iPod Touch users you can only use the pho­tos from the pho­toroll (no camera).
• Wifi con­nec­tion or mobile net­work to upload the pho­tos and see the results.
• Fonts, fonts and more fonts!
• Visit the web­site myFonts to read more about this great iPhone App WhatTheFont
• Down­load and install WhatThe­Font on your iPhone.

Con­clu­sion

I like the WhatThe­Font iPhone App a lot, it might needs some more approve­ments but my iPhone is turn­ing into a com­plete design stu­dio at the moment! Love it! The suc­ces rate for iden­ti­fy­ing fonts is (with good pho­tos) I guess some­where around 75%.

Go try this tool, I am look­ing for­ward to your find­ings in the com­ments!
Thank you in advance.