What is The Font? 5 Ways To Find The Name of Any Font (2024)

If you’ve spotted the perfect font and want to use it, you may be asking yourself;

“What is the font called?”

And.

“How do I install it?”

This guide shows you five quick ways to identify what is the font, whether it’s on a website, in a .pdf, or printed on paper. Plus, we’ll show you how simple it is to install a font on either Windows or Mac if you don’t have it on your machine.

Let’s jump right in and find out what is the font.

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There is a hard way and a simple way to find out the name of a font on a website.

If you are familiar with CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) coding, you can highlight and right-click on any text, then select ‘Inspect’ from the menu. On the right of your screen, a window appears with lots of lines of code telling you what the font type and size is. That’s the hard way.

Identifying a font in a .pdf is easy if you open it in a suitable reader like Adobe Acrobat.

When your .pdf loads, right-click on the document and select ‘Document Properties’.

If the font you want to identify is in printed material like a magazine, you can find the name with a scanned image. Once you have a digital image, you can upload the image to a website like WhatTheFont.

WhatTheFont ‘reads’ the font in your image and compares it to thousands it holds in its database. Here’s how to do it.

Upload your image, then select the area containing the font you want to identify. For best results, choose a single line of text. Also, try to pick an area without too much ‘noise’ in the background.

If technology doesn’t help you find a font’s name, you can always ask an expert for help.

Typography.guru is the internet’s largest online typography community, and it has a public forum with a section dedicated to font identification.

Indentifont is a helpful website if you know a little about a font you’re trying to identify.

Say you’re trying to find the font name Helvetica, and you know it’s called ‘Helv…something’.

Type what you know into Identifont and click go. The website returns the font it thinks you are looking for, any font variations, and a list of similar fonts.

Sometimes you need to know the what is the font size that a website’s using so you can emulate a look and layout.

But if you view the web page CSS for the font, it provides the size in rem units.

Rem units aren’t much help to most people: to translate them into regular point size and to find out what is the font size, you need to know the default rem value of your browser.

A more straightforward solution (if you don’t have the WhatFont plugin installed) is to find out what is the font size with a quick copy and paste.

Highlight the text you want to find the size of and copy it into any word processing document.

Here’s some text copied from the Apple website; the wordprocessor displays the correct font size. (It won’t necessarily identify the right font name as that depends on the fonts installed on your machine.)

If you’re in the process of choosing a font for your business, you might be wondering what is the easiest font to read. The font you pick is important because readable fonts help you communicate your message with clarity.

When you get your font choice wrong —such as using Comic Sans— your reader may make unfavourable assumptions about you.

Serif or Sans Serif?

The first thing you need to decide is whether to use a serif or a sans serif font.

The serif is a small accent on the stem of a letter. Serifs are said to aid legibility and derive from the stylistic flicks commonly found in calligraphy.

Serif fonts are the oldest style of font (dating back to the invention of the printing press) and are widely used in print media. The serif helps space out the words on the printed page, helping the reader track along a sentence.

One of the most popular serif fonts in use today is Times New Roman.

So which should you choose, serif or sans serif?

The most readable type of font depends on your publishing medium.

While the first computer displays used serif fonts, screen resolutions back then were lower than today’s displays, so a serif font helped with readability.

Today, with pin-sharp screen resolutions, sans serif fonts are easy to read. If you’re publishing on the internet, you can’t go wrong with a sans serif font in the Helvetica family.

But if you’re publishing in print, then a serif font could be the better choice, especially if there is lots of text in a smaller font size.

Studies concerning font readability

Font readability has been the focus of scientific study. One experiment found no conclusive evidence that either font type increased legibility.

Another study determined that font point size was a more significant factor in readability. It concluded that 14 point text was significantly preferred over 12 point typeface by readers of advancing years.

Once you’ve picked your preferred font style, be sure to publish it in a point size large enough not to strain the eyes of your readership.

Both Apple and Microsoft use a sans serif font as their default system font; Apple uses San Francisco, and Microsoft uses Segoe.

If the font you want to use is not installed on your machine, here’s how you can add it to your system.

First, download the .zip file of your new font. Some fonts are free and open-source; other fonts, like Helvetica, need to be purchased.

You can access a wide range of open-source fonts at Google Fonts. But if you need to purchase a font, Monotype at fonts.com has a broad selection.

When you download a font, it will be a zip file that needs extracting first. Once extracted, open up the folder to view the files.

To install a font in Windows, the font’s format should be True Type Font or Open Type Font.

1. Look in your folder window in the Type column to check you have the correct format.

To install the font, right-click on each file and select Install. If you have administration rights, you can install the font for all users of the machine.

When you download your new font, it will likely arrive as a compressed zip file. Double click on the download to extract all the files; Mac OS will extract them in a new folder for you.

Open up the folder to view the files. There could be several files in the folder, which are the same font in different file formats.

We recommend you install the TTF or True Type Font version.

1. Double-click on the TTF file, which will open a font preview window.

Click the ‘Install Font’ button in the preview window to add the font to your machine. Your Mac’s Font Book loads after the install and displays the new font alongside a list of all the fonts present on your computer.

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