You have a screenshot, a photograph of a sign, or a PDF a client sent, and you need to know what it is set in — or, more often, you need something free that looks like it. Automatic identification works when the image is clean and fails exactly when the job is real.
Try the automatic route first, and know its limits
Image-matching services compare letter shapes against a database. They need horizontal text, high contrast, clean edges and, ideally, a full alphabet. They do badly with photographs at an angle, script faces where letters join, tight tracking, and anything where the letters have been modified — which is most logos.
If the file is a PDF rather than an image, do not use identification at all. Open the document properties: PDFs record the name of every font embedded in them, which is an exact answer rather than a guess.
The five letters that give a typeface away
When the tools fail, this is what a designer looks at, and it is quicker than it sounds.
- The lowercase g. One storey or two? A double-storey g with a closed lower loop is old-style; a single-storey g is geometric or humanist. It narrows the field faster than any other letter.
- The lowercase a. Double-storey with a curved bowl, or a single circle with a stem? A single-storey a means geometric almost every time.
- The capital R. Straight leg, curved leg, or a leg that kicks out? This is what separates faces that otherwise look identical — it is how Arial gives itself away against Helvetica.
- Terminals on the c, s and e. Cut horizontally, or at an angle? Horizontal reads as a grotesque; angled reads as humanist, however tightly you set it.
- The numerals. Do they all sit on the baseline at capital height, or do some hang below? Old-style figures are a strong signal and appear in a minority of faces.
Then decide what you actually need
Half the time the identification is a means to an end: the real question is what you can legally use that looks like it. If the answer turns out to be a licensed classic, the alternatives section lists open faces that stand in for the commonly specified ones — matched on the shapes above rather than on the name, with a page each explaining which shapes the substitution turns on.
And if you have narrowed it to a category rather than a face, the archive filters by style — geometric, humanist, grotesque, didone, slab and the rest — which is usually how far identification gets you on a photograph anyway.
A shortcut for websites
If the text is on a web page rather than in an image, you do not need to identify anything. Right-click, Inspect, and look at the computed font-family for that element. The browser will tell you the exact name it is rendering, and the network tab will show you the file it downloaded.