AFAIK it's the best of its sort, but I've used it a few times (not for a few years though) and I don't think I've ever found the actual font. Though of course it finds similar fonts which sometimes can be enough.
My secret used to be http://www.typophile.com/ which had a font id forum and you'd get an answer from someone usually within a few hours. It was a really cool place.
They were down for a while so I don't know if that community re-formed or not.
I did, sometimes. When it works, it works great, but often it doesn't. There are also Matcherator[1] and What Font is[2], but they are not better or worse in my admittedly limited experience.
Personally, I've had much more luck with the manual font identifying tools which ask you specific questions about the letters you have. Mostly because often the font I'm looking for is on an image with a lot of noise and these automatic systems have a hard time isolating the letter.
Clearly this is a fairly niche application, but all the same I’m surprised no one has built a font identifier in the past few years based on modern machine learning techniques.
I think Adobe is now offering something like that with the latest Creative Suite, though I don't know if it employs ml. The last Photoshop had that functionality and they seem to have expanded on it.
I was wondering if that is what inspired this thread, the threat of Adobe.
It's been in there for a couple of years (Photoshop CC 2015.5) and it matches installed fonts and fonts available through Typekit. Type > Match Font...
I've been using them a bunch for this little plaything https://javascriptbabybooks.com/ and since I don't need to find the exact font (a close match is just fine), they've been wonderful.
Personally, I don't use the mobile app and my use case is only on the desktop, so I hope they roll their update out for the desktop soon.
I agree that it’s the best of its sort, at least compared to the other popular options I’ve used, but it’s not being compared to much. The rest seem barely usable at best and just designed to get you to buy any font whatsoever.
I still occasionally use it when I’m totally stuck but have had pretty crappy luck with getting an exact match.
What it’s been pretty good for is getting me close enough to look for other things that look similar to it’s suggestions and branching out from there.
