[Tfug] OT: font utility

[Bexley Hall]

Hi,

I do a fair bit of DTP.  Often, I have to "match" some
details of existing documents that I had no part in creating.
One of the most annoying (tedious, unrewarding) aspects of this
is finding the right *fonts*.

Unfortunately, fonts have become ubiquitous and inexpensive.
And, with font factory software, it is way too easy for
folks to crank out (crappy!) fonts at no/low cost.

As a result, I see documents with lots of "no name" fonts
that are often *close* to industry standard fonts but "not quite
right (e.g., they may have changed some glyphs or replaced
some with alternate symbols, etc.

It *seems* like it should be possible to scan a sample of a font,
manually identify the glyphs in that sample (i.e., so you don't 
need to rely on OCR) and then search a database of font images
(that you have built using another tool?) for a close match.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like the type of tool a
commercial vendor is likely to produce (I assume there is only
a very small market for it as having access to the *source*
documents would eliminate the need for this tool!).

But, maybe someone has come up with a "toy" that does the
same thing?

Alternatively, some ideas for google searches that could be fruitful?
Most of my searches have turned up tools that let you *visually*
compare fonts.  This seems to be a misnomer -- I would call that
*previewing* the fonts (even though you might be previewing two or
three at a time). By contrast, *comparing* the fonts seems more
ideally suited to a mechanization...

Thx,
--don