a font question

[ratcreature]

I created an artwork last November, which is one in a series. It used a particular font, but I can't remember what that font was. Unfortunately that was created on my now dead, previous laptop. I now want to make a new artwork in the series and need to use the same font, but it apparently wasn't one of the standard fonts (though I'm sure it was a free font), because when I open the old XCF file, Gimp does not display the name of the font, but it is blank. Is there a way to get the name of the font I'm now missing from that old file so that I can download the font again?

Comments

[melannen]

I don't know if it can be retrieved from the .xcf file, but when I've had that problem in the past, a few times I've managed to find the name using identifont.

[ratcreature]

I'm afraid I don't have all letters in the previous artwork. I probably still have my old font folder backed up somewhere (unfortunately well organized backups of all files are not my strong suit), and could just reinstall the bunch of fonts I'm still missing. I just feel GIMP ought to be able to tell which font it still needs. I mean, clearly the info is somewhere available to the program or it couldn't match the name to the font if it is installed.

[sophie]

You actually don't need all the letters; you can use http://www.identifont.com/sample.html to say that you only have a limited set of letters.

[jana]

xcftools maybe? It's a package which you can get for various linux distributions and with which you can extract information from xcf-files.

For Ubuntu
For Debian

[ratcreature]

I tried this, but it only lists the layers, what kind they are, their opacity and size, nothing about the fonts used.

[jana]

Sorry that I couldn't help. One would think that this kind of information also should be listed.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I don't really understand why Gimp doesn't just give you some info box with "you are missing the font xy used in this image file", when it encounters such text layers in a file you want to work with, but are missing a font. That would certainly be more convenient than me having to mess around with font identification websites. *sporks the technology some*

On the bright side, I think I have found the font I was using in the font folder of my backup drive.

[sophie]

When I have an image of a font and need to know the name, the first place I go to is WhatTheFont, which lets you upload a sample image, identify which connected parts of the image (that it automatically identified) map to which letters, and get results. It's really quite handy!

Since it works only on connected parts of the image, the letter "i" is often detected as two separate characters - the dot and the tail. In that case I normally leave it blank for both, so that it doesn't give any false matches.

[ratcreature]

Thanks! That did come up with a good match for the font, unfortunately not a name I recognize and one to buy, so I assume I used some free/imitation version of the same kind, but maybe that'll help me find it again.