Adobe Fonts Visual search - useless results

[Chris201Chris]

I am trying to find a font that matches an old book. When trying the Adobe Fonts Visual search the result was about the worst of all font search engines I have come across (see screenshot).

Am I doing something wrong when trying this (I ensured all letters were matched) or is it as "unintelligent" as the search result shows?

[Bobby Henderson]

Visual font searches are becoming a bit more problematic these days. First of all, the source image of lettering has to be pretty good in quality and resolution as well as free of technical issues -such as the lettering being artificially distorted. Any squeezing, stretching or shearing applied to the letters will ruin search results. It also helps if the lettering sample image is properly level.

The next problem is one that is a bit out of control of us end users/customers. Over the past 20 or so years there has been a great deal of buyouts or mergers of type foundries and type sellers. Monotype, by far, has been the biggest buyer of other type companies (Linotype, ITC, Berthold, Hoefler and on and on). And they have bought up the most popular commercial type web sites (MyFonts, Fonts.com, FontShop and maybe some others). But Monotype's efforts at buying up so many other type companies and font sales web sites has caused some other typeface designers and type companies to revolt. They've pulled their fonts from those popular web sites, either moving them elsewhere or merely selling them direct from their own pages. I have commercial fonts I've bought from the MyFonts web site that are no longer available there. Likewise, if you use that site's "what the font" tool, it will only pull up similar matches that are for sale there. An exact match may go missing.

Adobe is kind of in the same boat. They're not deliberately trying to monopolize the type market (which Monotype and its private equity owners appear to be doing). But they still have limits on the type families they can run image search comparisons. Unfortunately there are no font visual search tools that have a complete reach of all type families available in digital form. The Font Squirrel site has a pretty decent visual search tool that is good for finding a lot of open source fonts as well as some commercially sold ones. If I get stumped about the identity of a certain typeface in an image I sometimes have to resort to visting a couple different forums and ask others to help ID the typeface in question.

[Chris201Chris]

Thank you for a thourough and good explanation!
I still think though, that the kind of matches I got from Adobe font search were surprisingly far away from the original (which stems from a scanned page, albeith not in super high resolution) - and this is what surprised me :).

[Bobby Henderson]

It is kind of surprising how far off some of the search results were. I would have expected a variety of Caslon typefaces or other results in/near that type category.