An Experience with What The Font

John Savard

I thought I would add another sample of text to my page on the history of type. I found a particular famous quote in an old book, and that book seemed to me to be set in Baskerville. Yet, I wasn't quite sure, so I thought I would double-check by using MyFonts' resource What The Font.

It turned out, though, that the digitized copy of the book I had found online wasn't of sufficient quality to allow that tool to be useful to me.

The top results it gave were distressed faces, such as Caslon Antique, which was one of the results; an earlier result was something called "Letterpress Text" and there were several others in a similar vein.

So it seems that What The Font expects type samples of perfect quality, and makes no attempt to look beyond surface imperfections, which is entirely understandable, but occasionally unfortunate.