Student Makes 'Shazam For Fonts', a Gadget That Detects Fonts and Captures Colors (theverge.com) 71
Imagine being able to use a miniature device which could quickly tell you the kind of font you're looking at in a book, and also tell you about its color. Fiona O'Leary, a student at the Royal College of Art, has developed exactly that kind of device, and she is calling it Spector. The device, which is in its prototype phase, also saves the font type information and loads the data on Adobe InDesign. The Verge reports: If she loved the font London uses on its subway maps, for instance, she could use this device to capture that font and load it into Adobe InDesign. Spector takes a photo of the font and uses an algorithm to translate that image into information about the shape of letters and symbols. It then cross-references that information with a font database to correctly identify it. The Spector also captures colors and breaks them down into CMYK/RGB values.
Re: Uh yeah... that already exists (Score:4, Informative)
What The Font [whatthefont.com]
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Imagine being able to use a miniature device which could quickly tell you the kind of font you're looking at in a book
OK, let's imagine....
(bursts out laughing)
Nope. Not seeing any use for this at all. If you spend all day worrying about the fonts you see in the world then get a life.
Re: Uh yeah... that already exists (Score:1)
WhatTheFont.com
wow, nobody's thought of that before... (Score:1)
Whatfontis ?
Identitfyfont?
Here's a list of seven more [webdesignerdepot.com] microaggressions.
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Or maybe she's a genius and this device is detecting the font, then uses an advanced algorithm that sends vibrations across the book to make it type the font name. That's why she keeps putting books on her macbook keyboard in the video.
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Indeed. I've been using WhatTheFont [apple.com] for identifying fonts from pictures since it was launched in 2011. And being able to pull a color from an image is nothing new either. Everything from the built in Digital Color Meter app on every Mac to the Sherwin Williams paint app on my tablet can pull colors from images.
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the Sherwin Williams paint app on my tablet can pull colors from images
There's an app that replicates the "eye dropper" tool that's available in any image editing application? Does it cost money?
Re:Uh yeah... that already exists (Score:4, Interesting)
It shouldn't. It's pretty trivial. You could do it yourself by taking a picture then using that eyedropper tool on it.
You might not get the results you expect though. The color the camera sees will depend a lot on the illumination color. And your eyes don't faithfully report the actual color of things.
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Eyes? Colours? No. Everything.
Our entire sense of vision is an illusion our brain creates as an interpretation of the real world.
The brain relies on information fed to it to determine what is happening in the world. It has no direct connection of its own and must rely on information sent through nerves to tell what is going on.
Humans can not truly see, hear, smell or feel the world. At best a human can derive a point of reference for a moment in time limited to the sensitivity of the organs available.
That w
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Our entire sense of vision is an illusion our brain creates as an interpretation of the real world.
Morpheus, is that you?
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I'm bored. Can I have some of what you're smoking?
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> You might not get the results you expect though.
ESPECIALLY, if the font is MF'ing COMIC SANS!
Oh shit... (Score:1)
An "algorithm"!
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in MongoDeepNode.js+++ with appier apping of apps!
Already exists (Score:3, Informative)
WhatTheFont can look at font text and tell you what it is.
Taking an existing color and converting it to RGB or CMYK is what any hardware store that will color-match paint to a sample has been doing for years.
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From TFA: "The prototype recognizes seven different font families [...]"
Yeah, that's much better than WhatTheFont.
form before function, gonna get punctured... (Score:2)
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But did a woman make it?
No? See. This one is better!
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But by making this a device, it actually seems to be a degradation. Now we have to carry another device around? What's wrong with making this a mobile app? It would literally do the exact same thing.
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I don't know, I bet this thing has less space than a Nomad. Lame.
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Lots of things are just improvements on other things.
Why, the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached!
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Yeah, but this one was designed by a WOMAN
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WhatTheFont can look at font text and tell you what it is.
Every time I've tried it, it has misidentified. And it's not like the differences were tiny either - it's oblivious to things like whether the point of a V is flat or pointy, or whether 3/4/5/7/9 are descending below the base line.
If someone could launch a font identification tool that actually works, it would be swell. My guess is that too many commercial fonts have unreasonable licenses that prevent them from being used, but I could be wrong.
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This doesn't seem possible to do accurately through a cellphone camera without some other lighting and/or color reference being present.
You mean, like, oh, maybe a built-in flash that exists on every smartphone camera?
Ok... (Score:2, Insightful)
So she uploads a photo to WhatTheFont using the api they provide for doing just that, and then pulls the RGB values from the not-in-anyway-colour-calibrated image and converts them to CMYK.
Fucking groundbreaking.
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her solution does one other thing
It also requires that funky looking camera that won't fit in a pocket. But the shroud might mean it has its own light source so color accuracy could be okay.
Fiona O'Leary ... (Score:1)
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Fiona means parents care enough about being respectable in Ireland to give her an Irish name, but are not secure enough to give here the more upper class (and abroad unpronounceable) "Saoirse". "O'Leary" means that the family have not yet married into a high enough status clan to afford a double barrelled, post independence gaelcised name like "McDonagh-Ã" FaolÃin".
This necessitated sending the child abroad for better qualifications,
Kiss my Wingding! (Score:1)
I'm itchin' to try it on the ol' Wingding font
Uhh, copyright? (Score:2)
Some people (big companies) get all bent out of shape if you rip off their font without a license to do so.
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If the company is using a custom font for their logotype, it's not going to be in the database this uses (and even if it was, you're not going to be able to find the font unless the company provides it to you, or someone leaked it, in which case using it is already copyright violation, but knowing its name isn't).
If the company is using a publicly available font for their logotype, they have no grounds for complaint if someone else uses the same font. I can't start "Pfhorrest Comics" with a logotype of just
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Typefaces can be design patented (Score:2)
Many countries offer design registration that confers exclusive rights in a typeface [wikipedia.org] for a term between 14 years (United States) and 25 years (Great Britain). But you're correct that after this expires, it becomes legal to launder the typeface a font with the print-scan-trace method, so long as you A. don't refer to the original font's control points in your trace and B. don't use a similar name for your font. Instead derive the control points from the rules set forth in the "Digitizing" chapter of Apple's [apple.com]
I've got a feeling... (Score:1)
A cool idea that is incredibly poorly executed (Score:2)
Lame.
Color Grab (Score:2)
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Not advanced at all. I just taught a workshop on neural networks using identifying both the location and value of several handwritten digits scattered randomly in a larger image as an example problem.
Fonts are easier because they're much more consistent than handwritten characters.
Not convinced (Score:2)
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Interesting thought. One would imagine that identifying the font first should radically improve the accuracy of the OCR on all those difficult bits like 1/l etc.
unless you can properly white balance (Score:1)
or you have a refence colour in shot, your RGB values are completely fucking meaningless
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Can it detect the SpaceX font? (Score:2)
But can this gadget accurately determine what font SpaceX uses for it's on-screen telemetry display? I've tried this several times using several online recognizers and none of them get it right.
describe-it app (Score:1)
Free version (Score:2)