The camera tracks four points on the corners of the Toyota iQ by way of colorful stickers. The camera above, mounted to a crane, takes those points and delivers them to software that creates the shapes, punctuation and all-important letters and numbers that make up a font.

You can actually download this font here, although we doubt it will make you type faster or anything. It was only a Smart Toyota, after all (although I was personally amazed this kind of car could drive like that).

Updated: Ugh. That's a Toyota. Sorry to all you Smart car owners out there. [Vimeo - Thanks, Tom]

The company responsible for the font—Font Bureau—makes custom designs for "publications and corporations". This particular one is called Prelude, and has a similar sibling that Palm uses for the ads.

And if you're really a font fan, you'll want to check out that font fight video we posted a while back. [Typophile via Engadget]

[CollegeHumor]

Mr Dashwood spent months gathering all the letters of the alphabet, accumulating a collection that ranges from passable to perfect. These letters were spotted in Victoria, Australia, but the concept would work anywhere—if its citizens have the time and dedication to find it, then any country, state or city can have its own regional Google Maps font. [RhettDashwood via TodayandTomorrow]

UPDATE: Reader Matt sent us Geogreeting, a site which lets you create messages and e-cards using incidental Google Maps lettering.

Designers Squidspot created the table, with fonts arranged roughly into related group columns showing (although Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica not being in the same family! Ok, I'll stop). They've also ranked each roughly according to popularity according to a number of sources.

It's really cool to see who designed which typeface and when, and where everything falls in the popularity queue. [Periodic Table of Typefaces (full-res JPG) by Squidspot via Lifehacker]

The process is really easy-snap a photo, crop it down to the area where text is the clearest, then help the app's text recognition divine which letters are which, and presto, your identification comes back with a list of choices. The app nailed each font I tried with black text on a plain white background, but it has a little trouble when different colored backgrounds enter into play (like when I tried to identify the font for the Gizmodo logo on our page).

I tried it on my handwriting, and it actually found a few fonts that were pretty close. Apparently I write in a font called Giant Sized Spectacular Bold. Sounds about right. [WhatTheFont via Daring Fireball]

Bob Hayes died in 2002 and this letter was supposedly a thank you pre-written in the the hope that he would someday enter into the Hall of Fame after three decades of disappointment. Naturally, a reading at the conference by his half-sister Lucille Hester sparked a lot of emotion among the Cowboy's organization, the fans and the NFL. However, it appears that the letter is actually a forgery, and Lucille may be a Texas-sized fraud.

Hayes' true relatives have long argued that Hester was nothing more than a friend during the last years of his life—and an examination of the letter has concluded that the signature is a blatant forgery and it was typed in Calibri—a font that didn't exist until Microsoft introduced it in Office 2007. If that wasn't enough, his legendary teammate Roger Staubach's name is misspelled in the document.

So, if these allegations are true, what is Hester's motive? According to those involved she is an attention seeker that is using Hayes' name to glorify herself. At this point, the Hayes family is investigating their options. Involving the law is a definite possibility, but in the immediate future they are trying to ensure that Hester doesn't get any where near the stage during the induction ceremony on August 8th. [DallasNews via Yahoo Sports]

Well, while it's free to download and use, Treehugger's testing found that the Ecofont, though readable, really just prints the text lighter. In our guesstimation, you could probably recreate the ink savings of Ecofont by printing your materials in draft mode instead. Plus, that way you can choose the whichever font you like.

But should you be so bold as to print Ecofont in draft mode? Existence would cease as we know it. [Ecofont via Treehugger]

[CollegeHumor]

Who knew it was so simple to draw an X Wing? Chances are that our site will cut off part of that second image, so make sure to hit up the third link to see the whole thing. [Ironic Sans via BBGadgets and Justin Chrisostomo]

The Droid family of fonts consists of Droid Sans, Droid Sans Mono and Droid Serif. Each contains extensive character set coverage including Western Europe, Eastern/Central Europe, Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish support. The Droid Sans regular font also includes support for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean support for the GB2312, Big 5, JIS 0208 and KSC 5601 character sets respectively.

What do you guys think of what they've already got? [Typophile via Daring Fireball]