When I first put up a site at this domain back in 1999 I was using hsc on BeOS: when I moved away from that to Solaris for creating sites I (stupidly) trashed the disc as I thought I’d copied everything off it. I hadn’t. The hsc site config was copied, but e-mail, JPG captures of my children (ok, then it was just child) and the fonts I used to create the logos on the site were all lost, but I didn’t notice straight away: it wasn’t until I tried to recreate the site in an updated style (using b2) that I realised my mistake…
I tried using IdentiFont but the sample I had was missing too many of the key letters used in their questions. I tried {Google} and searching my fragments of guessed names, looking through massive free font directories, and I even unpacked some of the old BeOS installers to view the list of built-in TrueType fonts to see if it was a basic one. Nope: I’d gone and grabbed it from some long forgotten source and even the latest incarnation of BeOS (Zeta) doesn’t have it, but last night I found a link to WhatTheFont which takes a sample image file and analyses it: it found the name right away 🙂
So, now I knew I had used Carlos Light Condensed (also known as Roman Medium Condensed) but I was also certain I hadn’t paid for it (I’d have known the name then) or pirated it (I’d got it all by myself, afterall or I could have asked for it again), so an hour or so on {Google} again this morning looking for related looking but differently named fonts finally paid off: a summary on http://jeff.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/freefonts2.html linked to Postsadness Fonts, and Electra Condensed (Zero) is exactly the one I was looking for. Hurrah.
So the summary is: throw images files at WhatTheFont and (re)discover those names.