X4 Review Part 6 What the font and Vista Integration

What the Font

CorelDraw X4 Review – WhatTheFont and the Search Function

You know one of the things I always do when I am eating is save the best for last. Thus I usually eat my vegetables first, starches second and meat last. The same can be said when I am doing reviews of software I will typically save the better parts to last. I will throw in some juicy parts but finish off with some real good ones. Although I still consider the improved print merge function in Corel X4 my favorite the last two items we will look at today can be pretty impressive.

In this article we will be reviewing two features that have been added to X4. The first is Corel’s support for the advanced search function in Vista. You can now assign meat data to your file and search for that data. The second is the integration of “What’s My Font” into CorelDraw. This utility try’s to identify your scanned font by measuring the font and given you a number of suggestions

Indentifying Fonts

One of the biggest problems that we face in our daily awards and marking lives is the constant crappy artwork that our customers insist on giving us. You know the ones “Yea I thought I would make your life easier so I downloaded the logo off our web site. You can use that right”? Ummm. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard that one.

If you have read some of my previous articles on redrawing logos you will know that the hardest thing to do when you have to redraw a logo is to match up the type style that was used in the font. Redrawing the so called “Non Text” part of a logo is usually easy. It is the text part that tends to be hard. It is always easier if you can type in the text rather than having to redraw it.

To make your graphic life easier X4 has introduced a link to “WhatTheFont”. This site was designed a while back to be able to make it easier for you to identify unknown text and figure out what font style was used to create it.

Now before we proceed with looking at this new feature and how you use it we need to first understand what are the requirements in regards to the type of image that needs to be passed to the “WhatTheFont” web site. The attached instructions were taken directly from the “WhatTheFont” web site.

“… WhatTheFont supports most common image formats, for example GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP. The maximum image size is around 360 x 275 pixels. The ideal letter height for the best search result is about 100 pixels. Try to get the text horizontal and make sure letters are not touching. WhatTheFont will only recognize uppercase and lowercase letters. For more tips and information, please see WhatTheFont Usage Notes. These are ideal scanned images for WhatTheFont. The characters are about 100 pixels in height and the baseline is horizontal. Click on an image to automatically upload it to WhatTheFont.

• The number of characters in your scanned image makes a significant difference in the accuracy of the search results.
  • Max components (characters): 50
  • If you are identifying a font that is very similar to others:
    • use as many characters as possible or a total of 25 and;
    • use characters that are unique to this font
• If possible, space the characters apart more than normal
• Max image size is 400,000 pixels (width x height)
  • ideal max. size of file containing NO descenders:
    1666 x 120 pixels
  • ideal max. size of file containing descenders:
    1250 x 160 pixels
• Scan images at 300 dpi

Best file format: Tiff, Grayscale, 300 dpi”

Now that we have a better understanding of what we need to make this technology work let us go to CorelDraw X4 and see how we do it.

It is actually quite easy to use the command in CorelDraw. To activate the command requires that we select it from the pull down list as per Figure 1

Figure 1

When you open up the command your cursor will turn into a circle. Once it has turned into a circle you can drag a selection box around the text that you want. Figure 2 shows that I have dragged a selection around some text that I typed in. Note: The text that I have created was originally artistic text that I converted to a black and white bitmap. The bitmap was saved at 300 DPI as per the instructions by WhatTheFont. The red box indicates that the box width is 534 pixels by 62 pixels. This is not ideal if we look at what is required for a good estimation. Ideally we need an image that is 166 by 120 pixels. This may not be an ideal bitmap but it will be a good test for us to try. It is important to review the measurement that comes up when we are creating our selection box.

Figure 2

Once have created the selection box the area you want will stay clear and the area around it will be grayed out. You can click in the box or press enter to accept the selection.

Figure 3

Once we have pressed enter or clicked inside the selection box the text image is automatically opened up in the WhatTheFont web site. Figure 3 shows the web page that comes up.

Figure 4

You will see from Figure 4 that each character is isolated into its own box. In this case the software algorithm has done a good job at estimating each character. The only character that has been missed is the” I” in the word “is”. What we have to do in this case is to fill in the “I” for the software. As your scans become worse you will find that you have to do this more often.

Once you have made sure that all the boxes are filled in you can you can click on the search button that is located at the bottom of the page. See Figure 5.

Figure 5

Once the button has been clicked the software will try and estimate the font that you are using. Figure 6 shows us final screen where our results are displayed. You can see that the software has provided us with the proper font. It has provided us with 5 possibilities that the font could be.

Figure 6

What about if we use a more obscure font? Figure 7 shows us a new font that we created in CorelDraw and converted to a 300 dpi black and white bitmap.

Figure 7

Next we can select our font and access the website. Figure 8 shows us that the WhatTheFont web site has made an estimated assumption on the text provided.

Figure 8

Figure 8 shows us that again TheWhatFont website has provided us with a good estimation of the font that we used.

As the last two examples have shown the WhatTheFont website has done a good job of estimating the font that we have used in our examples. The important point to make here is that we have used images that are of good quality and are clear. What about if our font is smaller in size in terms of the pixel size.

Figure 9 shows us a screen capture of the same arial font that we created earlier for our first example.  The one difference is that the capture is smaller in size.

Figure 9

Figure 10 shows us that that the web site has not done as good a job as it did on our first scan.

Figure 10

The one main conclusion that we can see is that your image has to be of proper size for the website to be effective at estimating your font. In CorelDraw if you want to make the image large just zoom in on the text. Figure 11 shows the same text that I used in Figure 9. The only difference with this image is that I zoomed in on the text and created a new selection (the text becomes bigger). Note: make sure that you do not zoom in too much as this will create an image that is too large.

Figure 11

It appears that the WhatTheFont software can do a good job for us at estimating those unknown fonts that come across our desk every day. The only problem I see is that a lot of us would use this tool is in trying to figure out fonts within logos. The problem with some text is that there are not enough characters in the scan. Or the text could have been modified. This modification can cause any job estimations to be less accurate.  The other problem is that the software wants 25 characters to make a proper estimation. Most logos do not come close to that number.

The examples I have used are perfect. Sometimes what happens in the real world is a little harsher in what it provides. A lot of logos we receive are of bad quality and do not provide adequate resolutions for us to maybe get a good estimation by the software on the web site.

Enhanced Windows Vista Integration

One of the new features that has been built into Windows Vista is the ability to search and categorize your hard drive. This search technology will read metatags that are saved with a file. For those that know me the one thing I always questioned Corel on was why they had included the ability to tag a file with user inputted text when you could not search for it. For example let us say that we save a file and that we did for the local High School called Local High School. It was a number of 7 by 9 plaques and they were used for the athletic awards.  When we save the file in CorelDraw we have the ability to type in some descriptive words that we can search later on. Figure 12 shows us this job for the local high School being saved.

Figure 12

Figure 12 shows us that there are two locations that I can place in searchable tags. The Red box indicates that I can place in a “Title”. The blue box indicates I can place in a “Subject” line. The green box allows me to rank the file.

Okay now that we have created some searchable tags let us see how Windows handles them. Open up Windows Explorer. Figure 13 shows us that I am searching for a file with a tag “Plaques” – see the green box. I purposely took out the word “plaque” in the file name. The red box shows the results of the search. The Blue box shows us the search area which is the directory “X4 Review”.

This is slick and will help when you are searching those couple of thousand files that you have on your hard drive. Just make sure that you get in the habit of placing in some “tags” that can be searched and give you a clue as to what is in the file.

Figure 13

Thumbnail Preview

One of the problems that we have had in previous versions of CorelDraw is the inability to be able to preview a Corel file within Windows Explorer. Many times I have gone to open a CorelDraw file from Explorer and had problems picking the proper file because I could not preview the contents of that file. With the new version of CorelDraw we can now preview the CorelDraw file from within Explorer. Figure 14 shows my CorelDraw files previewed within Windows Explorer.

Figure 14

One of the features from within Windows Explorer is the ability to change the size of the Thumbnail.  Figure 15 shows the drop down menu that allows me to change the size of the preview that I want to use.

Figure 15

The ability to see thumbnails of your files makes it a lot easier to find a file. There are so many times where I am testing and I have a number of files with similar names but I need one in particular. This file I can pick out a lot of times by just looking at the thumbnail.

The ability of CorelDraw to be able to supply searchable tags is a very welcome addition to the power of CorelDraw. If you create a lot of job files and want to make it easy to find those files later on than I would suggest that you place text within the job so that you can search it later on.