"What the font" is a website (a section) where you upload some graphic text and it tries to guess which font it is, some sort of crossbreed between OCR and image comparison I guess.

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

I was wondering how hard it could be to create plugins, scripts or extensions, for GIMP and/or Inkscape. Whereas I know that GIMP has some scripts that don't look as if you got to be an actual programmer to create one, I don't know if that's the case with Inkscape. And, at the same time that GIMP's scripts don't look exactly daunting, I'm not sure that there's some upload capability. Perhaps it would have to interact with some "external" function, call some program, like curl (on linux, I don't know of a windows' equivalent). Is that even possible?

If you wanted a script that does this locally (i.e. without being connected to the computer) the biggest hurdle would be constructing a database containing a character map of thousands of fonts and building relationships between them. This doesn't seem feasible.

If you wanted a script that would take a sample and upload it to WhatTheFont automatically it would be best if WhatTheFont had an api, which it doesn't.

One thing to consider is with the latter option where would the interaction happen once the script is executed? Would it automatically upload it and then just open a browser window for you to type each character that it has recongised individually?

Seems like it could be possible, but just more thought maybe on how it would be implemented