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Posted by kickofline 9/5/2025

Making a font of my handwriting(chameth.com)
336 points | 80 commentspage 3
jdranczewski 9/5/2025|
The description of trying to use FontForge cracked me up, I recall trying it myself a while ago and it going very similarly!
dodobirdy 7 days ago||
Is the tech good enough for it to be undetectable. If I were to hypothetically use it to complete the handwritten assignments that my old school professors demand (in much of the yappier courses) would this slip through without getting caught. This is all hypothetical of course.
edweis 7 days ago||
What a bummer the website https://www.calligraphr.com is a subscription model. I could impulsively pay $100 to get my handwriting as a TTF font and be quite happy about it.
akshayshah 7 days ago||
TFA goes into this in some depth: there's an option to subscribe for one month with a one-time payment. After the month is up, your account automatically reverts to the free plan and you get an email with your fonts attached.
urbandw311er 7 days ago||
The subscription is only for backups and ongoing changes - you get to keep your font forever. I think the author mentions that the whole experience cost them about $10
clickety_clack 9/5/2025||
I might try this with my own handwriting. How well does it replicate an indecipherable scrawl?
2Gkashmiri 7 days ago||
I had an iPhone 2g back in 2010 when we had the first app store and cydia.

I had seen an app where one could draw each alphabet and it would spit out a font file....

They broke it with a paid update and I have never seen another app like that

Liftyee 9/5/2025||
Honestly, this idea is intriguing enought that I might actually pay for a month of that service. I'm willing to make that my first software purchase because I want to support symbiotic business practices like the one described (as opposed to adversarial rent-seeking ones seen all too often these days).
nartho 9/5/2025||
>Next, I wanted to change the heading fonts from a monospace font to something cursive

The font created is print, not cursive.

wjrb 9/5/2025||
Maybe cursive in a "Comic Sans in the default 'cursive' fallback font on Windows" kind of way.
spcebar 9/5/2025||
At least in the world of web, cursive is a typographic term referring to fonts that aren't sans or sans serif and are typically used for decorative purposes.
pessimizer 9/5/2025|||
I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography. Cursive there afaik mostly means that it has a ton of ligatures (i.e. a ton of "sorts.")

Fonts that are decorative, when I worked in prepress, were simply called "decorative." It just meant "not for body text" i.e. hard or annoying to read. I assume in the past it meant "don't buy a ton of these, and none in small sizes" because you weren't ever going to be putting a bunch on a page.

CharlesW 9/6/2025||
> I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography.

You're correct, "cursive" is a handwriting term, not a typographic one. The parent commenter almost certainly meant "script". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_typeface

OJFord 9/5/2025|||
Even like this where it's not just not 'joined-up', but not even independent cursive characters? This is just printed characters, as GP says, this seems particularly relevant because I'd think the hardest part of doing this with cursive handwriting would be all the combinations of the ways different letters flow together - if you restrict yourself to independent characters then you remove that problem.
WalterBright 9/6/2025||
Hmm. A font of my own handwriting sounds like unbreakable encryption!
samyar 9/5/2025||
If i do that you will need archaeologists to find out what i have writen
croisillon 9/5/2025|
Related:

Show HN: AI tool to turn handwriting into a font (June 2025, 0 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268487

Coding my handwriting (May 2024, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40408291

... and probably quite a few more!

ycombinete 7 days ago|
I’ve always been excited by posts like this but they always end up looking like far too much work for my taste.

This is the first one where I’ve thought, “hey I could do that over the course of a few of the baby’s naps!”

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