Finding and replacing text in a traced image

Lettering is where traced artwork usually lets you down. A logo or a sign comes out as a pile of letter shapes that look nearly right but are slightly wobbly, cannot be retyped and do not match any font. Find text in the image, part of image tracing in Vectornation by Zaweba, tackles that problem directly.

It compares the letters in a trace with the fonts installed on your computer, offline, and suggests what the text says, which font it is set in, the size and where it sits. If the suggestion is right, Use this text puts real, editable text in that place.

What it is good at

The tool works best on clear, separate letters. Shop signs, printed labels, posters and logos set in an ordinary typeface are the sweet spot. If you can see a gap between each letter, the matcher can usually treat each one as a shape to compare against the fonts you have.

That makes it useful for a familiar job: someone sends you a low resolution picture of their logo and asks for a clean version. The shapes can be traced, but the name in the logo is better as real type. Find text in the image suggests the font, you check it, and the name is rebuilt from the font itself, crisp at any size.

What it will not read

It is honest about its limits, and you should be too. Joined script, where letters run into each other, is not read. Neither is hand lettering, because there is no installed font for a person's handwriting to match. Strokes under about 3 pixels are also too thin for it to work with, which rules out very small text in a low resolution image.

For those cases, keep the traced shapes as they are, or set the text again by eye with a font you choose. A better scan, at a higher resolution, sometimes lifts thin strokes over the limit.

Checking a suggestion before you accept it

Treat a suggestion as a starting point. Look at the letters that differ most between fonts: a lower case a or g, the tail on a capital R or Q, the ends of strokes on a C or S. If those match, the font is probably right. If the overall shape is close but those details differ, you may have a similar font installed rather than the one used.

Size and position come with the suggestion, so the new text should land on top of the traced letters. Before you accept, compare the two. A slight difference in letter spacing is common and easy to fix afterwards with the Character panel.

Fonts on your own computer

Because matching happens offline against installed fonts, the result depends on what you have. If a font is not on your machine, the tool cannot suggest it. If you have been sent the brand's fonts, install them first. Vectornation's font manager lists system and per-user fonts and can activate a folder of fonts, so a client's font folder can be made available before you trace.

Nothing is uploaded, which matters when you are working on someone else's unreleased artwork.

Where it fits in a trace

Run the trace first, with settings that keep letters crisp and separate. If you use guide areas, a Keep detail area over the lettering helps. Then use Find text in the image on the result.

Once the text is real type, the rest of the type tools apply: kerning, styles, smart punctuation, spell checking. And if the final file must not depend on the font, Create outlines turns it back into shapes, this time clean ones drawn from the font rather than wobbly ones drawn from pixels.

The usual slip is accepting text without reading it. A matcher can mistake a capital I for a lower case l or a zero for a capital O. A quick read of the suggestion catches it.