I did this in a much more manual way in 02006: http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/

All the steps I did at the time should still work today, and they may be of some interest if you're trying to do the thing Chris gave up on in "Failing to do it myself", perhaps because you're dissatisfied with the results of the alternative approaches.

I was abused as a kid so my handwriting is crap. I also don't know cursive very well. I feel like if they made a font of my handwriting everyone would say, "woah, oh! There goes Mr. Poory McIrresponsible Parents!" If you tried to pull it up in Microsoft Word the font (typeface) name would be, "Danny Wets The Bed."

That's an aside though; great job mate mega post!

There was retail boxed software that would do this on Windows 95 that included worksheets and software. You'd write examples in each square of the worksheet that you would then scan in and convert to TTF with their proprietary software.

I would say it seems like a simple enough task for a weekend project but I know better.

I did this for my old blog back in the 2000s - I used an online service that produced a pretty bad font that I could clean up using FontForge into something reasonable. It was a fun novelty but my penmanship is pretty bad and once in a while I would get flamed in the comments in my own handwriting.

For those who were hoping for the physical version of this, I recommend the Stuff Made Here Video on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw

I'm developing a web open source application to create your own handwritten font. It's already functional, and I have plans to add new features. I encourage you to try it out. https://ownfonts.cielo.ovh/ Here's the source code: https://github.com/c4p0/OwnFonts If you're interested in collaborating on the project, you can send me a message on GitHub.

I always thought this was such a cool idea to preserve the handwriting style of someone you love (I adore my partner's handwriting), but the conversion to a font never seems to keep the spacing right, as you show in the final comparison.

I've been thinking of tinkering with an image to image generation model to convert text output from the font into something that looks closer to the handwritten version. Seems like it should be possible, but you need a lot of data.

The author’s experience summarises well the sad state of GUI apps, especially in the open source world.

That’s why we end up using command line tools and text-based interfaces. Or I end up writing code to do things.

It’s not that I dislike the idea of GUI apps, it’s that in practice, they make me have a really bad time, and usually don’t even get the job done.

The description of trying to use FontForge cracked me up, I recall trying it myself a while ago and it going very similarly!