A quick fonts question

July 7, 2008 12:54 PM

How do I find out what font a particular website is using?

I looked in View Source of a couple of pages and I couldn't find the answer there. Any ideas?

posted by dydecker to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Are you using Firefox? The add-on called "Firebug" can easily find the answer for you.
posted by bryanjbusch at 1:00 PM on July 7 [3 favorites]

The font is most likely set in some nested css file. You could just copy-paste the text into a word processor and see what font the text is in. Or give us the website's address.
posted by stereo at 1:00 PM on July 7

put a screenshot into Whatthefont
posted by OldReliable at 1:03 PM on July 7

Font tags, generally speaking, are considered deprecated, if that's where you were trying to look. If the page uses CSS, find the url of the stylesheet file in the page source and open that. Look for it inside a "link" tag, in the head of the page code, with attribute rel="stylesheet".

If the page uses Flash or lots of images for its text, however, you're out of luck. Sometimes something like whatthefont.com can help with fonts in images but not always.
posted by aught at 1:06 PM on July 7

Thanks all - firebug is a very useful add on. It does what aught suggests to do but...automagically.
posted by dydecker at 1:17 PM on July 7

Firebug is cool, as it also allows you to change the font, font size, etc and see the result live without having to use a HTML editor. It's invaluable if you are considering changing fonts, etc and want to see the potential effect.
posted by baggers at 3:08 PM on July 7

You can do the same thing with the stock DOM inspector by looking at the "computed style" output.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:37 PM on July 7

Another handy tool that is quite common is identifont. Especially handy when trying to identify a printed font that you don't have a scan of.
posted by alhadro at 4:46 PM on July 7

The web developer toolbar for firefox has a 'view style information' window which displays the styles applied to whatever the cursor is pointing at. For images and logos I use whatthefont, the best website evar.
posted by Tixylix at 8:36 PM on July 7