
Show HN: Calligraphr – Convert your calligraphy into a vector font - tobltobs
https://www.calligraphr.com/
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AnOscelot
Great idea! I remember doing this 10 years ago following a tutorial which had
a form to fill out, and then downloading a shareware font editor. I'll
bookmark this site for my next personal font project.

This might be a little morbid, but I had an idea which would fit this site
well. Promoting your site to those who would like to preserve a very personal
aspect of their lost loved one. Was thinking about this because my next font
project involves me going through my mother's letters and scrapbooks for
lettering samples. I lost her two years ago and think a font of her writing
would be one of the best ways of remembering. I think a lot of other people
would feel the same.

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tabeth
This looks great! However, I find the pricing odd. Is this really the kind of
thing someone is going to pay monthly for, as in see consistent usage? I think
a more appropriate pricing structure would be either pay per user or pay for
credits, which could then be used.

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dabber
Not sure I understand either. At the top of the pricing page, "pro" is
advertised at "$6.90/month" however at the bottom of that page they state:

"We do not offer subscriptions as most of our users do use Calligraphr.com as
a one-off activity and we don't want to charge you just because you have
forgotten to cancel our subscription."

~~~
noveltyaccount
Agree, confusing. I interpreted it to mean $6.90 gets you access for one
month. They do not automatically charged you at the end of the month, you have
to buy it again.

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j_s
Back in the day I used Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition My
Font Tool to create a font from my handwriting. I couldn't find a link to
download it from Microsoft these days but some of the semi-sketchy download
sites claim to have it.

Internet Archive to the rescue:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20051223202032/http://www.microso...](http://web.archive.org/web/20051223202032/http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/tabletpc.mspx)

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specialist
These projects are neat.

What I really want is a custom font of my handwriting that wiggles each
character just a little bit, to better simulate my own handwriting.

I've poked at this problem a few times. I couldn't figure out how to encode
the variations in the font.

Ages ago, there was an AutoCAD plot driver (from Autodesk dealer McNeel &
Associates) with a hand plot feature. It'd fudge lines so they'd look like
they were hand drawn. So maybe the trick for a hand written font is to post
process the vectors.

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peteretep

        > What I really want is a custom
        > font of my handwriting that wiggles
        > each character just a little bit
    

About an hour ago, I replied to this with "You can use ligatures for that".
Then I thought about it and thought "I'd better explain what I mean". And I
was thinking of a system where you use characters near another character -
even those up to two or three characters away, to essentially act as a random
seed for the selection of a given character, using a very large number of pre-
generated ligatures.

Then I thought: huh, that's pretty clever. I should look at patents for that.

Anyway: someone else got there first: read this:

[http://www.underware.nl/case-studies/random-vs-
clever/](http://www.underware.nl/case-studies/random-vs-clever/)

~~~
tobltobs
An interesting fact of the history of self modifying fonts is that one of the
first of those fonts, the FF Beowolf, was created by Just van Rossum and Erik
van Blokland. And Just van Rossum is the brother of Guido van Rossum.

Some more details from FontFont: "FF Beowolf was born at the end of the dark
and murky 1980s when Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland found a way to
change the programming in PostScript fonts. When printed, each point in each
letter in every word on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a
shaken, distraught appearance."

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niedzielski
This is neat! I recently worked on something similar (on a much smaller
scale!) for a low resolution bitmap font. The code is a hack but basically
takes pixels in a GIMP file, converts them to vectors, and eventually spits
out a TrueType font file. Of course, this result is primitive and has none of
the cool features listed on your page!

[https://github.com/rndmem/mem-font](https://github.com/rndmem/mem-font)

~~~
j_s
This software doesn't split up the grid for you, but rather requires each
letter be input completely separately:

[https://github.com/aizenbit/Scribbler/wiki/User-
manual](https://github.com/aizenbit/Scribbler/wiki/User-manual)

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grimoald
Free alternative: [http://www.myscriptfont.com/](http://www.myscriptfont.com/)

Althoug I had to edit my scan in Gimp several times before a decent and usable
font came out.

~~~
tobltobs
Calligraphr has a free plan also. And a much better image processing, images
taken with a camera are usually good enough, you don't need a scanner anymore.
You also can edit characters after importing if there should be some
artifacts. Myscriptfont also doesn't support Ligatures or character
randomization and only a very restricted character set. Disclaimer:
Myscriptfont is also a project of mine.

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djKianoosh
Is it possible to do this with any other/all languages?

I'd love to see some persian calligraphy done this way but I cant imagine how
hard it would be to map all of the characters properly...

~~~
tobltobs
Calligraphr tries to support as much scripts/languages as possible.
Persian/Arabian scripts are not supported currently as they are really
complicated. At the moment we try to improve the support for Japanese.

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leblancfg
Does anyone know if the opposite exists? That is, I have hundreds of semi-
structured handwritten pages which I'd like to scan or photograph, and get
decent text files out of.

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kodfodrasz
You can try some OCR, and the DJVU format can handle text data linked to
character positions in scanned text.

[http://djvu.org/resources/embedding_transcripts_in_handwritt...](http://djvu.org/resources/embedding_transcripts_in_handwritten_pages.php)

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joncp
Neat! To convert more visitors you'll want to show more examples. I found
myself thinking "but what does it look like?"

