Raghotham Sripadraj

16 Dec 2018

Deep Learning for Fonts

2016, It was a sunny morning in London, Nischal & I were roaming around the Westminster Bridge.

img

We were speaking at PyData London that year and the topic was Deep Learning

img

Of all the things, there was this one thing we were super curious to know — Which is the font on the boards of the buses?

img

Picture courtesy — Wikipedia

This was one of the most legible, crisp, clean font we had ever seen! We quickly googled to figure out it was Johnston. That was easy! However, I see a lot of instances where we will not be able to google and find out the font. Given that I’m a deep learning practitioner, why not use it to classify fonts? Why not have an app where you can point at an image of text and it tells you the font?

Hold on! Maybe someone should have already thought about this. A quick google shows we have two good options:

  1. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator
  2. https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Turns out that the results are not as expected. Sure, let’s build something better — Fontastic!