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Posted by rendx 11 hours ago

Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font(arcade.pirillo.com)
354 points | 116 commentspage 2
mixylplik3 3 hours ago|
I can't speak to the service in the headline, but I used a service at least 10 years ago and brought it to a family party to show off. I thought it was a cool thing to do so we all filled out the alphabet/number/symbol sheets I printed out and made a bunch of fonts for family members. Didn't think much of it, the novelty faded, but then people started getting old and dying.

Now I have little snippets of history and unique handwriting, albeit simplistic and imperfect, that remind me of my loved ones passed in a unique way.

xmattx 8 hours ago||
Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.
stratosgear 8 hours ago|
Same here. The characters need to move higher. They look like I wrote them below the baseline... :(
simonebrunozzi 5 hours ago||
Tangentially related: anyone has suggestions on an "automated" way to "print" pages with a typewriter? If you want to have papers that "look" as typed with a typewriter, as opposed to printed with laser printers and such.
c22 5 hours ago||
Teletype machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
vonunov 3 hours ago|||
If you also want a thing to do typewriting on, later-model word processors (e.g., Smith Corona PWP series) tend to have a feature that auto-types text entered and edited earlier. It'll have the imprinting insofar as the type impacts the paper, but it's not going to have the off-center / over-inked / patchy manual typewriter look. For that you may just want to find a font face that replicates it.
jagged-chisel 4 hours ago|||
Add this to your list if things you try: https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/02/a-hyperrealistic-typewrit...

Article links right to the font.

kmoser 3 hours ago||
This is cool, but when viewed up close, laser-printed letters still lack the fuzzy edges and imprinted texture of letters created by typewriter slugs.
electroly 5 hours ago|||
This is what a teletype is: it's a typewriter with a serial connection. You send bytes over the serial cable and it types them.
2ap 5 hours ago|||
You want a daisy wheel printer[1] I think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing

airstrike 5 hours ago||
Only tangentially related, but this is a good research starting point: https://www.gt-pressura.com/
easton 8 hours ago||
Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.
chandraonline 4 hours ago||
OMG Yes! Dating ourselves aren't we? Pirillo, Laporte, Dvorak - awesome folks from Tech TV
coxley 8 hours ago|||
Right!? My mind teleported back to the TechTV era for a second.
xanderlewis 5 hours ago|||
I saw pirillo.com and thought 'it's got to be him'.
m-hodges 6 hours ago||
LockerGnome!
mattv8 6 hours ago||
Had to dig to find this but back in 2009 I was bored so I made a font based of my handwriting. I had a Wacom tablet and used this font creator- I'm pretty sure it was called Fontographer. Anyways it's still floating around the Internet: https://fontmeme.com/fonts/mattfont-font/
zimpenfish 10 hours ago||
I've used iFontMaker for this on the iPad - quite amusing to be able to select my own monospaced font for terminals (even if it is just "old man traced over Courier Prime badly".)

Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.

vaylian 10 hours ago||
The instructions say that rows 2 and 3 in the template can be either lower or upper case. How does the website determine the case in those rows? Does it simply check if row 1 looks different from the other rows?
psychoslave 9 hours ago||
Not sure it would work in my case. I do love to take the very different freedom it brings. For example the mid bars of a t is often taken as an opportunity to go through above the whole word. But I wouldn't do it every single time, as it would feel too much overload.

I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.

al_borland 6 hours ago||
30 years ago there were ads in SkyMall for a service that did this. I always really wanted to do it as a kid. That desire has faded over time, but those ads really stuck in my mind.
sbcorvus 3 hours ago|
This is cool, but my handwriting is illegible so only a handful of people would be able to read it. Love the idea, though.
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