Show HN: Font Finder – Find and copy fonts from any webpage

font-finder.org

25 points·artemisForge77··4 comments

This is bizarre.

It's a downloadable binary that, as per their FAQ, uses their servers for the actual font ID... and yet there's no web version. Leaving aside malicious intent, I can't think of any reason to do it this way except to conceal the client-server API. And that's strange.

Also weird that there's no company or developer details. Whois for the domain is cloaked. The site is behind Cloudflare, but it looks it's hosted on alibabacloud error, at least partially. And the whole thing is free.

No idea if the file is signed, but won't be surprised if it's not.

I don't see many people finding an installable client for a font ID service from an unnamed developer striving to remain anonymous to be an appealing proposition.

Clearly this is a fairly niche application, but all the same I’m surprised no one has built a font identifier in the past few years based on modern machine learning techniques.

The need to match a particular font comes up fairly often in web development. There are a number of such apps/websites to help with this, the most well known of which is probably WhatTheFont [https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont/].

However, 90% of the time I don't care what font is used; what I really want is the closest free equivalent, preferably hosted on Google Fonts. I'd be interested to see if somebody could come up with an app that does this.

Is there a web version of this?

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