Font Expert Needed

[Brian Robison]

Any one know what font this is?

[Marc Myer]

Gosh, it's really hard to say. It's a modified Uncial style, and a quick search of Adobe's Font Folio doesn't yield anything close enough.
From the look of it, I'd guess it was done by hand. A giveaway is the closed bottom of the "M" and the little differences in the "e."
Wish I could be of more help.

[Mike Null]

I agree with Marc--it's done by hand.

[Ron Thompson]

Brian,

I'm new to this board and this will be my first post, hope I don't screw it up.
We have a sign business and I get alot of customers artwork that have fonts that are hard to find the correct one. But I found a great solution. We purchased a prgram called Imagaro Z (www.imagaro.com (http://www.imagaro.com)) that will trace bit mapped artwork and also determine the correct font in the design.
If you go to the website they offer a free trial. You might want to download the trail and run your artwork in the program to see what comes up.

I think the program costs $300 but they had a special last mont for $100 off if you downloaded the program directly.

Ron in San Jose

[Richard Rumancik]

Brian, if you are just trying to copy this sign and don't need other characters, I would find the closest available font. Type out the text approx to the size of the existing text and convert to curves. Then use your bitmap as a background layer, lock it, and drag the nodes of the text shape around for best fit and smoothing. (You can scale the curve characters at this stage if needed.) You could use the same "e" all over to save time. If you want to extend the character set - that's a different problem.

[Mark Winlund]

Brian,

We have a sign business and I get alot of customers artwork that have fonts that are hard to find the correct one. But I found a great solution. We purchased a prgram called Imagaro Z (www.imagaro.com (http://www.imagaro.com)) that will trace bit mapped artwork and also determine the correct font in the design.
If you go to the website they offer a free trial. You might want to download the trail and run your artwork in the program to see what comes up.

I think the program costs $300 but they had a special last mont for $100 off if you downloaded the program directly.

Ron in San Jose


Hi.... a little caution is in order... in order for the program to recognise fonts, they must be installed in windows. You cannot just turn the program loose in a font directory! I have about 7000 fonts on my hard drive, but can only install about 400 at a time in Windows. To me, this makes the font finding program just about useless. To it's credit, the Imagaro program is one of the better, if not the best, vectorizing programs out there. Perhaps the programmers will work on the font finding part, but it is essentially non-functional at this point with that big limitation. I bought mine about a year ago, so it may have changed. If it has, I'd like to hear from a user.

Mark

[Dave Jones]

While it sounds like it doesn't search your own fonts unless they are installed in Windows, it also sounds like it has a pretty extensive database of it's own that it can search as well:

"FontEye™ font databases:
More than 46,000 identifiable fonts in typeface collections from Adobe, Linotype, URW, Bitstream, Southern Software, IMSI, SoftKey, Expert Software, Swfte, Greenstreet, RomTech, Image Fonts, Flexisign, Corel plus all fonts installed in Windows."

[Chris Wysard]

Try these guys... They're serious font nerds, er.... experts.

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

[Mark Winlund]

Ah.... but the catch is, you have to have the font mfr's disk to use the program. For instance, if you wish to search the bitstream library, you must have the original bitstream font disk with all of the fonts unlocked! This is what I was told by the American rep for Imagaro, who is a software company in Sweden. I have many many fonts that were acquired from the internet font sites, most of them at no charge. These cannot be scanned.

The reason for all of this? I suspect that the bigger font foundries (like adobe and bitstream) would like to be sure that you own their version of a font before you can scan it, and have made a deal with Imagaro to make sure this happens. It also eliminates all of the smaller competition that don't have huge libraries, but may have a font that closely matches what you want.

I certainly wish I was wrong about this, but this is what I have found out. A tool that would scan any truetype font on your hard drive would be a marvelous tool. I can't count the number of hours I have spent either looking for a font, or digitising a scanned logo with a particular unknown font style in it.

I would love to hear from someone that has actually gotten the program to scan fonts located in a regular directory not installed in windows!

Mark




While it sounds like it doesn't search your own fonts unless they are installed in Windows, it also sounds like it has a pretty extensive database of it's own that it can search as well:

"FontEye™ font databases:
More than 46,000 identifiable fonts in typeface collections from Adobe, Linotype, URW, Bitstream, Southern Software, IMSI, SoftKey, Expert Software, Swfte, Greenstreet, RomTech, Image Fonts, Flexisign, Corel plus all fonts installed in Windows."

[Mark Plotkin]

I am going to split this post into two parts. First is to help Brian get engraving and second is to talk about Imagaro Z.

Brian,

I believe like other posters this is a custom font or modified from something else. I am guessing that what you posted was scanned from something like a business card or such. What would be helpful to know is if you need the font for other letters or just vector art of what you have posted. Assuming that you just need vector art, you could trace and adjust the nodes, doing the repeating letters only once and then copying as needed. Depending on the size you are engraving this will most likely work fine. You could also send it out to be vectorized with someone like Pete Bertrand for $12 to $24 (search other posts for his website) or you could contact the company and get and get the vector art from them. The later is sometimes challenging, but if they have signs or printed materials, it can be done by asking the right people.

Good luck!

I have Imagaro Z. It is a great program, but has a very steep learning curve. I will discuss the program in two parts, trace and font finder.
I purchased the program before X3 was available. The trace function is better with Imagaro and it does a better job of “clean up” making perfect squares and circles. The combine color function is also helpful in taking color bitmaps and turning them to vector art. It sure looks easy when you see the demos and experts use it. I have found it to be a lot more difficult on my own. I use X3 for most quick traces but on complicated stuff or when I am not happy with X3 results I use Imagaro and can usually do much better.

Now onto fonts. The font finder is a very powerful tool. The program does have the ability to find the 46,000 fonts. They are in 20 or so data sets. If you load and look through all the data sets it is more time consuming. If you own font sets such as Corel, fonts 2000 and others, you only need to put the original disks in when you load the program the first time. This will allow you to “replace” the font it has found.

Let me explain a little more. You can tell the program to identify all 46,000 fonts it knows about. It will tell you what the font is and you can then go get it if you do not own it or you can manually use the found font in Corel if you have if off the internet or another source. If you own the font and have the disk, you have Imagaro replace the vector trace with the actual font for perfect results right in the program.

Sorry for the long post, hope this helps everyone a little.