Font Identification Jamboree 2006

September 29, 2006 10:16 AM

Pretty simple font identification question with bonus small caps discussion!

Okay, here is what I am trying to identify. I need to clean this up and vectorize it, and damn it, I have gone through every Garamond and Friends that I know.



Extending the foot of the R is no problem, but I can't find the basis of the typeface. I would swear it's Garamond, but am I just missing one of the eight trillion Garamond variants?

In addition, I am aware of whatthefont.com and it has been amazingly unhelpful this time around. So. Anyone who correctly identifies this typeface gets a big hug.

BONUS SMALL CAPS DISCUSSION: Is there any sane way to manually do small caps (because it may come down to this) without having it look like something someone did in Word?

posted by Optimus Chyme to media & arts (10 comments total)

The way I do small caps if to use a text weight for the big caps and a semi-bold for the small caps and then reduce the size of the small caps until the weight matches the big caps. Usually works pretty well.
posted by Etaoin Shrdlu at 10:24 AM on September 29, 2006

Okay, I took Adobe Garamond Pro and did the small caps manually with Etaoin Shrdlu's trick. Not half bad. It actually looks better than the original.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 11:05 AM on September 29, 2006

Here is a somewhat helpful tool for identifying a font.
posted by maxwelton at 11:13 AM on September 29, 2006

It looks like this.

I simply removed the "R" and uploaded it to WhattheFont, but maybe you hadn't tried that.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 11:19 AM on September 29, 2006

It's definitely not Minutia: the stroke on the A is straight and not curved, the lower right serif on the K is double-sided and not one-sided, etc.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 12:44 PM on September 29, 2006

Sorry. I've grabbed fonts similar to my targets before and tweaked them to match using font editing software or illustrator. That always worked when I was making graphics for the newspapers I worked at, but I'm not sure what your requirements are (if this is for one project or you actually need the precise font used).

I'll keep looking. I did notice that the letters have an odd, precisely-hand-drawn quality to them (the bottom line of the "E" seems wavy and some of the serifs have rounded indents) but I'm not sure if that is an artifact of image compression/scanning.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 12:54 PM on September 29, 2006

Jeremiah, don't sweat it. There's no way to know what it "really" is with the original artwork provided, and I'm a big fan of AGP anyway.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 2:16 PM on September 29, 2006

I say it every time someone asks about a font: go ask the humans at Typophile, who love this sort of thing.

That said, don't vectorize it by hand - take it out of the Small Business Application (pdf) available on their site!
posted by O9scar at 2:43 PM on September 29, 2006

That said, don't vectorize it by hand - take it out of the Small Business Application (pdf) available on their site!
posted by O9scar at 2:43 PM PST on September 29

Welp, I'm glad that I spent hours of my life trying to work from a third-generation scan. :(
posted by Optimus Chyme at 2:50 PM on September 29, 2006

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/agfa/adobe-garamond/small-caps-and-oldstyle-figures/
posted by Optimus Chyme at 3:01 PM on September 29, 2006