Font ID Tool

[Sokramiketes]

For those of you that are doing lettering artwork, have you been to WhatTheFont? http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

They have a pretty cool upload feature where you can send a screenshot of text and they will compare it to font libraries and bring up the closest matches. 

Rarely will you get an exact match to a railroad font, but it will give you a great starting point that can then be dialed in with Illustrator.  Railroads all had their own fonts, and it's a field of study all it's own. 

Here I was looking for something similar to the Milwaukee Road's font so I could lay out AUTOMOBILE lettering for a project:

*Link Expired*

[Dave Schneider]

Very cool Mike. This is a big help to those of us who are font challenged.
Thanks!

Best wishes, Dave

[Zox]

Another good site is Identifont: http://www.identifont.com/

Their "Fonts by Appearance" option will ask you questions about a font , and will eventually give you a list of fonts with similar attributes. You can specify which letters you have samples of, so it'll only ask you relevant questions.

[sizemore]

That's frigging sweet!

The S.

[timwatson]

Yay a topic I know pretty well.

What the Font is a great tool. They also have a better iOS app if ya swing that way. For free typefaces dafont.com is a pretty good resource.

Anddd a personal pet peeve of mine ... if you model before 1957 DON'T use Helvetica for ANYTHING! It wasn't invented until 1957 and even then it didn't get any wide spread use until the early 60's (same goes for Arial - it's just a Helvetica knock off). I know those dry transfers look easy to apply but resist the temptation they may not be year appropriate for your layout.

[peteski]

Same here. I've used both websites in the past (with varied results).