Posted by rendx 9 hours ago
Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.
take g and f and c for examples
g and f are about the same height but different ofsets, and c would look like a capital C if scaled to the same size as g and f. (we probably want to auto adjust scales to match more evenly unless the text is on a grid (in case removing the grid is the difficulty)
These are just the difficulty I found by trying to make a more automated input to fontforge.
I'm in the same boat haha
The kids back then would sign notes to each other in these books, in lieu of a yearbook.
The handwriting is absolutely stunning. I have to do this now.
Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.
"Can I buy your company?"
"No."
She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
My current one I don't like it as much as the one I used to have. That old one would turn into a font and feel cool.
It's worth noting that it's only at the end that it turns out you have 3 options for using the rows (you can't say use row 1&2 caps but row 3 lowercase)
For whatever reason it really struggled to detect the cross hairs. It thought the top right cross hair was the O.
I had intensely compress the black white range to make it detect at all.
What should it look like btw?
Also even though it detected A thru F great it kind of fell to pieces down the page suggesting that the registration isn't good enough to detect each block. Maybe let people mark the cross hairs manually?
More registration marks and ones that are more distinct than cross hairs would likely help. I used a high quality scan! So registration should have been muche asier than a photo.
I don't really know what's wrong!
I tried it various pens and paper sizes and printer scales. And it suddenly worked but only if scanned at low res (200DPI).
Still I got a partially working font at the end
I don't want to manufacture something that looks like it, but loses the soul of it.
edit: basically what DANmode replied to the same parent. I did this 10 years ago while running for political office.
But something about the way the app applied the threshold on the scanned image, made the letters really broken. Maybe having a thicker pen would be the solution.
We've done all we can for toast0. But he'll have a secretary so it'll be fine
I never did get to have a secretary, but thanks to COVID learning losses, I do manage to have a lot better penmanship than about half of kids going into high school this year. :)
She didn't lecture but she did tell stories about her farm, hunting, and occasionally some science. We could ask questions and tell stories if we finished copying the notes before everyone else was done. So, one of the takeaways from her class was getting very efficient and neat with my writing. I tried to write in a clean all caps and eventually learned which strokes were best for speed and spacing. I still use that hand-font and I always think of her sitting on the wall radiator laughing through some story of trying to fix a bad situation.
My elder brother had (simplifying the story a lot) such bad handwriting that they let him type his year 12 exams, turning a possible disadvantage into a frankly unfair advantage, especially in English, where being able to output four times as fast is valuable. Wish I could have done that.
Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name.
(Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)
Controlling access to stationary, prescription pads, and the office’s fax machine is one part. Making it hard to forge the doctor’s handwriting is another.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift
One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.
My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.
I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian (cursive and print examples are here)
Seems odd, in hindsight, to teach hand-written prose uses a different set of symbols than when its typed out
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...
Understandable.
Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.
There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
I know. I always feel utterly embarrassed when Russian-speaking friends write down a movie title for me, and I have to ask them to rewrite it in block capitals.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
