Somebody posted a question asking for a font to be identified. I answered this question recommending a service that can automatically identify most fonts. In my experience, this service is really good and will probably solve the asker’s problem. Yet, my answer was deleted. Why?

This is a proposed FAQ to be referred to when such answers come up.


While we appreciate your attempt to help, allowing such answers would lead to a lot of problems in the long run, due to reasons that are admittedly not obvious:

We have strict requirements for font-identification questions, one of which is that previous (failed) attempts to solve the problem with an automatic font-identification service must be documented. The reason for this is that we do not want to be a mere service to operate these services for others.

For any user asking a font-identification question adhering to these rules, a recommendation of a font-identification service is likely not useful. While it still may be that the service you suggested solves the asker’s problem, this happens only in the following cases:

  • You got lucky and chose the one service that succeeds where others fail. In that case, you should provide evidence that this is really the case by actually presenting the solution.

  • Special care is needed when applying the service. In this case, you should document what tricks solved the problem, and present the solution. A mere link to the service won’t help.

If on the other hand, the font-identification question is not adhering to our rules, you should not answer it at all but flag the question for closure (flag → should be closed... → off-topic because... → Please review our font-identification, …). If we allowed every such question to be answered with mere links to font-identification services, they could all be answered with identical answers, posting which is no challenge at all. We might as well collect all font-identification services in a single spot. Actually, we sort-of did this here. So, if you know about a font-identification service that we don’t know about, that’s the place to share it.

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