Find the font in an image or PDF

How to find a font from an image

1. Drop a screenshot or a photo. A straight, sharp picture of the text works best.
2. FileFitly guesses a line of text and draws a yellow box. Drag a new box if you want a different line. Keep it to one line.
3. Check the words in the text box. They must match your box exactly, including capital letters. FileFitly tries to read them for you.
4. Press Find the font. The six closest fonts appear, each showing your words so you can compare by eye.

How to see which fonts a PDF uses

Drop a PDF and press List fonts in this PDF. This is exact, not a guess: PDFs record the names of the fonts inside them. You see each font’s name and style, its type, whether it is embedded, and which pages use it.

“Not embedded” matters when you send a PDF to a printer or to someone else. Without the font file inside, their computer swaps in a different font and the layout can shift. If you see “No”, export the PDF again with “embed fonts” turned on in your app’s PDF settings.

A scanned PDF has no fonts at all, because each page is a picture. In that case, take a screenshot of one line and drop the image instead.

How the matching works

FileFitly turns the text in your box into clean black-and-white letter shapes. It then writes the same words in each candidate font and compares them: the outline of each letter, how heavy the strokes are, how wide the words run, and the rhythm of letters and spaces. Fonts whose shapes line up most closely come first.

The candidates are 69 widely used free fonts from Google Fonts across sans-serif, serif, slab, display, monospace and handwriting styles, in regular and bold. Some are metric clones of common system fonts, so a match on Arimo usually means the original was Arial or Helvetica, Tinos points to Times New Roman, Carlito to Calibri, Caladea to Cambria and Cousine to Courier New.

Getting a good match

• One line, tight box. Include whole letters with a little space around them, and nothing else.
• More letters help. A full word or two compares better than a single letter. Letters such as a, g, R, Q and y are especially telling.
• Straight and sharp. Photos taken at an angle stretch the letters. Use a screenshot where you can.
• Exact words. If the text box says “Coffee” but the image says “COFFEE”, the comparison will be off.

What it cannot do

There are hundreds of thousands of fonts, many of them paid, and brand logos are often custom-drawn lettering that is not a font at all. FileFitly will not always name the exact original. What it does reliably is point you to the closest free font you can download and use today, which is usually what you need for a poster, a slide or a matching document.

Always check a font’s licence before using it in a logo or product. Fonts on Google Fonts are free for personal and commercial use.

Questions people ask

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