Frequently asked questions

A font finder identifies the typeface used in a piece of lettering — you give it a screenshot, logo, poster or PDF page, and it gives you a name you can search, download or license. Doing it by eye is unreliable, because there are tens of thousands of families in circulation and dozens of near-identical grotesques among them. A font finder does the comparison mechanically: it measures the letter shapes and ranks a library of fonts by how closely they agree with yours.

Not directly. Google Fonts is a catalogue you browse and search by name — it has no "what font is this?" feature and cannot take an image. Google Lens will read the text in a picture but will not name the typeface. What Google does give you is the open-source library itself, which is exactly what a font finder searches: upload your image here and every ranked match is a Google Font you can download free.

Start with the source. If the text is on a web page, right-click it and choose Inspect — the browser shows the exact font-family in the Computed styles panel. If it is in a PDF, the file lists its own fonts under Document Properties. If it is a picture with no data behind it — a logo, a photo, a screenshot of an app — then the shapes are all the evidence there is, and you need an image-based font finder to measure them.

On a website, open developer tools (F12, or ⌥⌘I on a Mac), select the text, and read font-family under Computed. Be aware that the list is a stack of fallbacks — the font actually rendering is the first one installed or loaded. In a design file, click the text layer and read the type panel. When there is no underlying file at all, take a screenshot of the lettering and identify it from the image instead.

Not any more, and the name is now a historical accident. An earlier version used a vision model to read the text in your image, but we measured what AI was actually contributing and it was not the answer: matching on described letterform traits put the right font first in none of twenty test images, at a median rank of about 200 out of 1,900. Identification always came from comparing pixel shapes. So the model was removed and the shape comparison now does the reading too — which made the tool more accurate, more private, and free to run entirely in your browser.

This one. There is no account, no email, no trial period, no limit on how many images you run, and no paid tier holding the real results back. The shape comparison runs in your own browser, so extra scans cost us nothing — which is why they can stay free. The fonts you get back are free too: every ranked match is an open-source family licensed for commercial use.

Matching is different from identifying: you are not after the original name but a font that reads the same on the page. Judge it on proportions and texture rather than details — x-height, letter width, stroke weight and stroke contrast are what a reader notices, not the shape of one terminal. Run your image through the finder and the ranked list is already sorted by exactly those measurements, or start from a paid typeface with the free font alternative finder.

Yes — a photo of a sign, book, menu or packaging works, as long as the text is roughly straight-on and in focus. Perspective and blur distort the letterforms, and the letterforms are the whole signal, so rotate a tilted line upright before uploading and crop to a single line at one size and weight. Screenshots beat photos whenever you have the choice, because the letters are pixel-sharp and undistorted.

The open-source Google Fonts catalogue is the largest source of fonts that are genuinely free for commercial use, and all 1,942 families are browsable in our font library — with a live specimen, measurements, pairings and copy-paste CSS on each page. Check the licence rather than the price: "free" on aggregator sites often means free for personal use only, while the SIL Open Font License and Apache License used here allow commercial use, embedding and modification.

If you know the name, skip identification entirely and search the font library by name, category, weight or shape. If you only know what it looks like, you need its shapes — plain typed text carries none, because the characters you type arrive in your font, not the one you are asking about. Screenshot the lettering (⌘⇧4 on a Mac, Win+Shift+S on Windows) and paste it straight into the box on the home page with ⌘V.

On the web, link the font in your page and then name it in CSS — every font page here gives you both lines ready to copy, so it is a paste rather than a setup. For a document or a design app, download the family and install it like any other font: double-click the .ttf file and confirm. Self-hosting the files instead of loading them from a CDN is usually faster and avoids sending your visitors’ requests to a third party.

A PDF normally records its own fonts, so read them rather than guessing: in Acrobat or Preview open File → Properties (⌘D) and look at the Fonts tab, which lists every embedded family. That is exact and beats any visual match. It only fails when the text is really an image — a scan, or type converted to outlines — in which case screenshot the page and use the PDF font detector walkthrough.

There are tools that will generate a typeface or vectorise your handwriting into one, but that is a different job from this site, which identifies existing fonts rather than making new ones. It is also worth knowing that a usable font is a lot more than 26 shapes — it needs punctuation, numerals, accents, kerning pairs and consistent weights, which is where generated fonts usually fall apart. If your aim is a particular look rather than an original design, finding the closest existing family is faster and better made.

Yes. Unlimited scans, no account, no card, no trial. The font matching runs in your own browser, so it costs us almost nothing per scan.

On clean screenshots the correct font is usually the top result, and nearly always in the top five. Photographs, angled shots and stylised logos are less reliable. Connected script fonts cannot be measured letter by letter at all, and you are told when that happens.

Your browser reduces the image to ink, splits it into individual letters, and compares each shape against a fingerprint of every letter of every font in the library — a 16×16 grid per letter — to work out both what the letter is and which fonts match. You can correct the letters before matching. The closest candidates are then re-checked by setting your text in each real font and comparing the whole word.

No. The image is sent once so the text can be read, and is never written to disk. The shape comparison happens entirely in your browser and never leaves your device.

No. There is no sign-up, and there is no limit to how many images you can identify.

It names likely commercial typefaces and links to the foundry, and pairs each with the closest free alternative. The ranked matches themselves are free fonts, because those are the ones that can be measured precisely.

Ranking by shape requires measuring the actual font files. That is possible for the open-source catalogue and not for commercial libraries. Rather than guess about paid fonts, the measured results are free ones and paid suggestions are kept separate and clearly labelled.

PNG, JPG, WebP and GIF, up to 8 MB. You can also paste an image straight from the clipboard.

Crop tightly around a single line of text at one size and weight. Use the sharpest version of the image you have. Text with distinctive lowercase letters identifies far better than all-caps.

Every font in the library is open-source, under the SIL Open Font License or Apache License. Both allow commercial use, embedding and modification.

Usually the crop. A loose crop mixing sizes and weights gives the matcher poor input. Beyond that, some fonts have extremely close relatives — check the top five before concluding it failed.

Real handwriting is not a typeface, so there is no font to find. You will get fonts with a similar feel, which is the most any tool can offer.