Michael Jay Lissnerhttps://michaeljaylissner.com/2012-01-27T22:15:58-08:00The Winning Font in Court Opinions2012-01-27T22:15:58-08:00Mike Lissnertag:michaeljaylissner.com,2012-01-27:posts/2012/01/27/and-the-winning-font-in-court-documents-is/<p>At CourtListener, we’re developing a new system to convert scanned court
documents to text. As part of our development we’ve analyzed more than 1,000
court opinions to determine what fonts courts are using. </p>
<p>Now that we have this information, our next step is to create training data
for <a href="http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/">our <span class="caps">OCR</span> system</a> so that it specializes in these fonts,
but for now we’ve attached <a href="https://michaeljaylissner.com/archive/court-font-analysis/font-analysis.ods">a spreadsheet</a> with our findings,
and <a href="https://michaeljaylissner.com/archive/court-font-analysis/extract_font_metadata_from_files.py">a script that can be used by others</a> to extract font metadata
from PDFs.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the top font — drumroll please — is Times New Roman. </p>
<table>
<tr>
<th>Font</td>
<th>Regular</td>
<th>Bold
<th>Italic
<th>Bold Italic
<th>Total
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Times
<td>1454
<td>953
<td>867
<td>47
<td><strong>3321</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Courier
<td>369
<td>333
<td>209
<td>131
<td><strong>1042</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Arial
<td>364
<td>39
<td>11
<td>41
<td><strong>455</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Symbol
<td>212
<td>0
<td>0
<td>0
<td><strong>212</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Helvetica
<td>24
<td>161
<td>2
<td>2
<td><strong>189</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Century Schoolbook
<td>58
<td>54
<td>52
<td>9
<td><strong>173</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Garamond
<td>44
<td>42
<td>41
<td>0
<td><strong>127</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Palatino Linotype
<td>36
<td>24
<td>24
<td>1
<td><strong>85</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Old English
<td>42
<td>0
<td>0
<td>0
<td><strong>42</strong>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lincoln
<td>27
<td>0
<td>0
<td>0
<td><strong>27</strong>
</tr>
</table>