Just came across this nifty gizmo called What the font?! – nice idea, very easy to use, and it works pretty well

If you want to know what font someone’s used for, say, an advertisement, a book, an album cover… take a picture of some of the text and upload it to the site.

It will then scan the words in the image and ask you to confirm it’s recognised the letters correctly before giving you the name of the font used, or the closest matches.

I tried a couple. Not surprisingly it’s not too tolerant of fuzziness, so a good sharp image helps.

This slighly blurry word was narrowed down to five fonts, I’m settling on Compacta EF Light.

This reminded me of Shazam the mobile phone service where you can phone a number from a club and it’ll text back to you the details of the track that’s playing (I haven’t tried it, but hear it works OK).