Top
Best
New

Posted by rendx 12 hours ago

Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font(arcade.pirillo.com)
380 points | 126 commentspage 3
al_borland 7 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.
SAI_Peregrinus 8 hours ago||
I'm dysgraphic with a small essential tremor, and often write in a hybrid between cursive & block gothic. I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them for each letter to look like my handwriting.

My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.

elevation 7 hours ago|
> I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them

I took this approach once and enjoyed the result. I filled out 10 copies of the template of a handwriting font generator and generated all 10 fonts. Then I wrote a python script to process a libreoffice document. If it saw the 'handwriting1' style anywhere in the document it would pseudorandomly alternate between fonts. Since uncanny resemblance of two adjacent letter is the biggest giveaway that a handwriting font is at play, I made sure my script would change the font within a word if there were two adjacent 'T' or 'S' characters.

I've since lost the code (it wasn't something I needed to often use) but with LLMs these days I'm sure I'd be inclined to build something better -- for instance, performing the randomization within a single font file, and using custom glyphs for adjacent 't' characters that might have a common crossbar, improved support for other languages I use, or rendering a particular case of my legal name as a signature.

fifferfaffer 5 hours ago||
Worked good for me scanning with the Google drive app and "enhancing" the scan. Typing out my own handwriting is a really neat experience!
sbcorvus 4 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.
plsft 2 hours ago||
this is actually quite good. wasn't expecting it to be that accurate.
shevy-java 2 hours ago||
But then I can not read anything anymore. :(
TomMasz 7 hours ago||
I did this years ago with a site whose name I can't recall. I still use the results for certain things, but it's certainly not a font you can use for everything.
micw 10 hours ago||
Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?
IAmBroom 8 hours ago||
Ironically, that's exactly what calligraphy is.

And learning to write in 'fonts' (hands) like block-print is still a form of calligraphy.

roughE 10 hours ago||
Asking the right questions
andsoitis 7 hours ago||
I write in cursive. Does this work for that?
alsodumb 10 hours ago|
My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)
r2ob 7 hours ago|
My hand writing is so bad(2)
More comments...