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So I created a layout for a website a while back and now am getting back to the project. The issue is I have a small logo designed and I am trying to recreate the logo at a much larger resolution.

The issue is I needed a spade (of hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds) for the logo and ended up using a text spade. It's a special character (♠) and as such a lot of fonts don't include it. So I am getting a little error in the list of layers:

enter image description here

I feel like in the past whenever this happened I would click on it to select the layer the font drop down would show "[Font Name]" instead of "Font Name" where the square brackets would represent that the font wasn't found — maybe I'm crazy but I feel like I've had that happen before. In this case the font is showing "Lucida Sans" which is a font that lacks the spade character.

When I try to edit the text I get this error:

"Editing or rendering the text layer "Spade" will cause its layout to change. Continue?"

… and when I click OK the spade disappears and shows that default Windows square for character not found.

Is there any way for me to figure out what font was originally used?

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3
  • Can you tell us, that what your character panel shows when there is missing font?? as in PS 4 you can see the screenshot no.2..
    – Jack
    Sep 19 '11 at 12:33
  • @Dominic - it's not, read the question again
    – Andrew G. Johnson
    Jul 18 '13 at 10:57
  • @Dominic - Paragraph #3 explains
    – Andrew G. Johnson
    Jul 18 '13 at 12:41
14

Target the text layer, then open the Character panel. The name of the font will appear in the "Font" field with square brackets around it, like this: [Times].

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2
  • How can we find it in CS6
    – Sukhjinder Singh
    May 29 '14 at 5:30
  • This is the way the font name shows up in all versions back to at least CS3.
    – Alan Gilbertson
    May 29 '14 at 9:19
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I'm not sure from reading your question whether or not you have other characters in the font you're trying to identify. If you do, you can render them to a TIFF and upload them to this site (TIFF is their preferred format):

http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

And it will do its best to identify it. I have about an 80% success rate, depending upon whether or not I have the "telltale" characters - those that are most unique to the font.

Failing that, you can also post a shot of whatever you have to their forum and let the enthusiastic font-o-philes take a stab at it.

Failing THAT - you might try opening the PSD in a free hex editor (Google for one - there's zillions) and look for the font that way. I recommend saving a copy of the file with only the text layer and nothing else. The font name will be in Unicode most likely. Search for one of the nearby tags, like "FontType", and look backwards for the font name. In the pic below, the font is "Trade Gothic".

enter image description here

Good luck!

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3
  • How did you come across this site? Amazing!
    – Yisela
    Aug 1 '12 at 1:37
  • The site worked well for me. I did need to crop my image to show only the text I wanted. I used a .png file. Opening the psd file in Notepad++ also worked as I was able to find the font type listed there, but as in the screenshot above, the characters of the font has null characters interlaced. (þÿ T i m e s N e w R o m a n P S M T)
    – Jon
    Aug 18 '15 at 15:31
  • Those are Unicode characters (depending upon the encoding, can be up to four bytes per character). Unicode is the standard for representing far larger character sets than ASCII (one byte per character). I suspect PS uses UTF-16, allowing non-English font names, but as you can see the designers of the system overlapped ASCII so most English text is still human readable.
    – Rob Craig
    Aug 19 '15 at 18:34
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It might be that your CS4 Extended is not rendering your fonts properly, basically when Photoshop does not find the font used in text layer it shows the font name and ask for font substitution (see the attached screenshot, there is same issue I also don't have the font which is used in my Photoshop text layer but still it is showing the font name, so I can find this somewhere. But in your case it's completely different,try character panel window might be it will show you the broken text file name.

error

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1
  • i am using cs4 and i would suggest you to find similar font which have such lookalike symbols..best of luck
    – Jack
    Sep 19 '11 at 5:14
2

To get the fonts information form a PSD file you can use online tools if you can't or won't use Photoshop (or if you prefer using Gimp, that rasterizes PSD fonts).

For example you can try out this html5 PSD font online extractor "Get PSD Fonts".

It's a PSD font information extractor based on Melitingice Github project psd.js that does not require uploading files, working locally in your browser page

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0
-1

It is extremely simple. Download the Required Font.

After downloading, Click the Character and Play Around Until you get the required layout.

It worked for me.. Along with the Font, some character settings may be present which can be detected only with that version of the software. For example, CS6-Faux Bold etc.. (it is present in the character window).

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  • 2
    The question is how they can find out what the font is, I don't think that this answers it.
    – WELZ
    May 23 '18 at 22:54

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