Adobe font search is bad

[JD74]

I often take a screenshot of one of Adobe's fonts and attempt to identify it using their search feature, but it consistently fails to find the font. It's quite frustrating and feels almost useless!

In contrast, the search functionality on myfonts.com is significantly better. It would be great if you could reach out to them for insights and work towards enhancing your own service to match their effectiveness.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't think there are any online font matching tools that are complete reliable. When any of them analyze images they're searching a limited data base of fonts.

Adobe is typically only going to provide nearest matches with fonts that are available via the Adobe Fonts service. The same is also true for MyFonts' "What the Font" filter. That tool used to be really great, but in the time since Monotype bought the MyFonts site quite a few independent type designers and small type foundries have removed their fonts from the MyFonts store. Any of those fonts will not be pulled up in searches done using the What the Font tool.

In some cases I've gone to sites like FontSquirrel and used their font ID tool to "macherate" lettering in uploaded images. That tool will cover a lot of free fonts and provide some overlap with certain commercial fonts stores.

If I'm still stumped about the ID of a certain typeface I'll visit a couple different forums and ask other participants if they can ID the font in question.

[Bhavana100 · Accepted solution]

My two cents: I am, with a running total of 212 discrete attempts to identify a font by using PS Match Font and my results:  0/212. Yep, you read that correctly, zero out of two-hundred and twelve attempts - Adobe's Match Font has never worked, not one single time. Stupifyingly, not even on typefaces, downloaded from Adobe's own libraries. Isn't this a perfect use case for a deep and high-quality dataset for training Transformer models? But, yes, please, let's keep funneling time/talent/treasure into fringe/edge capabilities instead of core funcrtionality.