ABSTRACT

Typography is a fundamental graphic design component and also a ubiquitous art form that affects our understanding and perception of what we read. Thousands of different font faces have been created with enormous variations in the characters. Graphic designers have the desire to identify the fonts they encounter in daily life for later use. While they might take a photo of the text of a particularly interesting font and seek out an expert to identify the font, the manual identification process is extremely tedious and error prone. Several websites allow users to search and recognize fonts by font similarity, including Identifont, MyFonts, WhatTheFont, and Fontspring. All of them rely on tedious humans interactions and high-quality manual preprocessing of images, and the accuracies are still unsatisfactory. On the other hand, the majority of font selection interfaces in existing software applications are simple linear lists, while exhaustively exploring the entire space of fonts using an alphabetical listing is unrealistic for most users.