[HN Gopher] Do LLMs identify fonts?
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Do LLMs identify fonts?
Author : alexmolas
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-07-31 14:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (maxhalford.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxhalford.github.io)
| Doohickey-d wrote:
| I'd be curious how much better a more expensive LLM would do -
| gpt-4o-mini and gemini-2.5-flash-preview-05-20 are definitely not
| the most capable LLMs one could have chosen.
| double051 wrote:
| Maybe they're just cheap and fast enough for the author to
| perform an affordable analysis?
|
| I agree that using the frontier models would be much more
| interesting.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Maybe I simply don't know how advertising works, but wouldn't it
| be totally possible that these fonts are just one-off drawn in
| text?
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| I would say there's a good chance they could be one-offs
| created by whoever was doing the ad. If you're paying an
| artist, having them do the lettering could certainly be cheaper
| than licensing a font for the purpose (or developing a font
| that'll never be used outside of one, or a series, of ads).
| k3liutZu wrote:
| My fellow designer friends would often do this. But they would
| start from actual fonts and do slight (or more than slight)
| adjustments to them to match what they wanted as an outcome.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Yes but if you mess with fonts too much, then this can
| happen:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snjCj0ntG8E
| smallerize wrote:
| The benchmark only evaluates responses once the community has
| identified the font.
|
| E.g. https://www.dafont.com/forum/read/569491/taylor-swift-
| font-p...
| empath75 wrote:
| That isn't the font, you can look at it yourself, it doesn't
| match.
| tjader wrote:
| To me it looks like the same font, but with letter spacing
| reduced so the letters don't flow into each other nicely
| but overlap a bit.
|
| Edit: here's the same effect made on inkscape:
| https://i.postimg.cc/TYV6K6bt/taylorswift.png
| pessimizer wrote:
| And no matter what, when preparing for print you're going
| to mess with all of the kerning until everything looks
| right or to get effects that you want. You don't just
| accept the kerning of any font. The only reason to buy
| expensive fonts is that you have to touch the kerning
| less often.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| How close are the wrong guesses? Fonts are fairly incestuous
| because the shapes of the characters themselves can't be
| copyrighted (only the code), so there are sometimes dozens of
| clones of very similar fonts... especially on a free site like
| dafont
| gdudeman wrote:
| Missing from the methodology: - was thinking on or off? (At least
| for Gemini) - was web search allowed? - was tool use allowed?
|
| It's quite likely LLMs don't "know" the fonts in the dataset, but
| they could figure many of them out.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| I've asked LLMs to suggest fonts/similar fonts for me from
| screenshots and seems like they are close enough to my untrained
| eye
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Why don't you just ask the document creator?
|
| Every time I turn around these days I encounter someone ready to
| use an infinite amount of energy that is being paid for by other
| people, to 'simulate' some analog process by temporarily taking
| the reins of some data center that is burning megawatts of
| energy. We are being given the reins for 0.5 seconds but very
| soon the horse will gallop away unless we have a lot of money to
| spend.
| qezz wrote:
| It's not always possible to ask the creator, especially for the
| old pieces
| mjburgess wrote:
| In this case, it's seems it is highly likely to be possible:
| https://www.studioheavenly.com/our-work/mira-wellness (1
| google)
| she46BiOmUerPVj wrote:
| I would have never thought to not use "what the font"
|
| https://www.myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont
| pwython wrote:
| Yea, I just used WTF to help that guy who was waiting 2 years
| to find a font.
|
| https://www.dafont.com/forum/read/522670/font-identification
| squigs25 wrote:
| WTF is often wrong, and actually, I don't think your answer
| in the 2 year old thread is correct
| StrangeDoctor wrote:
| I agree I feel like it's just blatantly funneling me into
| those dubious buy this font sites. I have somewhat better
| success with http://www.identifont.com/ usually
|
| I don't think the proposed font is correct either, I'm not
| even sure the concept of font works for that example
| though. Mainly the arches on the m are wrong, too arch like
| and whereas the example is more teardrop.
| Lemaxoxo wrote:
| Op here. I tried what the font a bit but didn't mention it in
| the article. I didn't get good results with it. Although it's
| probably a good idea to ask it for a guess, and feed that to
| the LLM too.
| cormullion wrote:
| I suspect that few professional (paid for) adverts use any fonts
| from dafont.com, and many fonts would anyway be unavailable to
| ordinary users. The current font recogniser programs are usually
| trained on commercially available fonts
| StellarScience wrote:
| With the latest Microsoft Word, if you open a PDF that is a
| _scanned image of a document_ and convert it to Word format, it
| does a pretty decent job of not only OCR (optical character
| recognition) but also picking matching fonts for various
| sections.
|
| I just tested this with my internet connection disabled and it
| still worked. Since it's doing local processing, I suspect it
| uses traditional OCR algorithms rather than LLMs.
|
| As the article concludes, LLMs aren't magic, they're just one
| useful tool to include in your toolbox.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| It's pretty easy to imagine an evolved mess of an open ad hoc
| but broadly adopted ecosystem where LLM are surrounded by a
| bewildering array of Node-like domain-specific extensions.
|
| Security concerns aside (...) that sounds pretty useful.
| StellarScience wrote:
| Right, for example early LLMs were notoriously bad at math,
| as they had been trained on language. They'd get simple math
| right, likely due to "rote memorization", but couldn't do
| basic arithmetic with 3-digit numbers. The common AI agents
| seem much better now. I suspect they added separate math
| processing logic and trained the LLMs to recognize when and
| how to delegate to it, though I'm not certain of that.
|
| Similarly coding-focused LLMs can access backend engines that
| actually run the code and get feedback, either to show the
| user or to internally iterate.
|
| Having a whole host of such backend processors would be
| great. Users still only ever have to interact using natural
| language, but get the power of all these specialized tools in
| the backend. There are some tasks LLMs can do, but special-
| purpose algorithms may do better, faster, and/or with less
| energy usage.
| mopsi wrote:
| I recently tried to identify a font from a screenshot of an ad
| and used everything I could find, from WhatTheFont to LLMs. The
| LLMs were hopeless at identifying the font from the screenshot,
| but ChatGPT eventually led me to the correct result after I threw
| away the image and started describing the font in plain text:
| monospacing, a dot in the middle of the 0, and (presumably) wide
| usage. It turned out to be Ubuntu Mono. It was surprising that so
| many obscure fonts were suggested, none of which were even a
| reasonably close match, while Ubuntu Mono was completely
| overlooked.
| elicash wrote:
| Results here are bad, obviously, but it'll be interesting when
| LLMs can not just identify fonts but unredact pieces of documents
| in places where just a few words are removed by analyzing the
| length of redaction, combos of letters that fit into it, and the
| context.
| lblume wrote:
| Why would you even need LLMs for that? Notwithstanding context,
| finding text that fits into a given bounding box is already
| perfectly doable via a classical algorithm (in this case e.g.
| based on dynamic programming).
| elicash wrote:
| > Notwithstanding context
|
| This is actually quite important! Especially when you're not
| talking about a single word/name but a group of several
| words/names.
| larodi wrote:
| What makes us think font information made it into the traning set
| atll, rather than something more along the line of "all chars
| that look like this one are to be interpreted as 'a'". doesnt
| need to provide font name for it.
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