
This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting - shill
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/this-typefaces-letters-are-the-average-of-the-worlds-handwriting/
======
jayd16
Why would you have an image with "The quick brown fox" without "jumps over the
lazy dog"? The whole point of the phrase is to use every letter.

~~~
dredmorbius
Something suggests it's an attempt to keep the font from being appropriated.
Though if it's used, that won't last long. And letterforms _aren 't_
copyright-protected (though the software by which they're derived may be: the
basis of font copyrights in software).

------
imurray
Reminds me of Averia, a font made by averaging fonts.
[http://iotic.com/averia/](http://iotic.com/averia/)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877025)

~~~
yellowapple
That's actually a surprisingly-good-looking font.

~~~
toupeira
Meh, it looks pretty average.

~~~
yellowapple
_badum TSSH_

------
srean
With my own handwriting, once described in school as "bovine diarrhea
committed to paper" (a rough translation) I have come to admire people's
handwriting in a sort of wistful way.

I think a discussion around this post would be incomplete without reference to
the font made from Dijkstra's beautiful and clear hand writing.
[http://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html](http://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html)
(search for Dijkstra) or if you prefer a pdf preview
[http://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Dijkstra.pdf](http://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Dijkstra.pdf)

I wonder if Ramanujam's handwriting has received similar treatment.

A sidenote: while searching for Dijkstra's font on Google had an experience
that had but disappeared from my memory. It has been a while since I have been
in a situation where I am unable to google to the the page that I know exists
on the web. This is the second time in the week that I felt this, something
afoot ? In any case wanted to find the letter to Dijkstra asking for
permission to use his handwriting for a font.

~~~
joeframbach
I wonder how many misunderstandings and frustrations occurred because of that
"z" which looks like a "2". Any of my math professors would have marked
anything with that 2 wrong.

------
devindotcom
Weirdly, it's only capitals, no numbers or punctuation. Not sure what I would
do with such a typeface! Also it's more like an average of the world's finger-
painting styles, since you have to draw the letters super big and on a
touchscreen. Still, everyone does have their own style, and there are some
interesting stats on the "left" of that nearly un-navigable website, letter
averages by country or profession and such.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Limited typefaces can still be useful for logos or titles/headers. For
instance, it's very common for stylized Japanese typefaces to only support a
small fraction of common characters.

~~~
devindotcom
Certainly true. In this case it seems like since it's meant to be an
"everyman" font it would be more useful to have it be in lowercase too, and
include numerals etc.

I'm guessing they decided writing 26 letters was about the limit of the
average attention span online - having to do it twice, along with 0-9 and a
basket full of symbols probably would result in lots of incomplete forms.

------
jcfrei
the link to the experiment:
[http://theuniversaltypeface.com/home](http://theuniversaltypeface.com/home)
\- a download apparently follows in august

------
bearcatfish
Does anyone know what kind of algorithm they'd be using to "average" all of
the letters? If you look at the I's and J's, you can see that though some
people use horizontal crosses, they aren't included in the universal letter.
Anyone have any insight here?

~~~
jarvic
I haven't seen anything specific about how they are doing it, but I can give
you a few guesses as to what common approaches would be.

The most straightforward way to model the shapes themselves is to put some
points on each letter in corresponding locations on each letter. Every sample
of each letter would need the same number of points, and each point would need
to be in roughly the same spatial location on the letter (so, for a letter S,
the first point in every sample would be at one end, the last at the other,
and the ones between at some kind of identifying landmarks).

Given these collections of sampled curves, the simplest thing to do is to just
compute the Euclidean mean, treating each of them as a point in a high-
dimensional space. You could go farther and do PCA, giving you not only a mean
but modes of variation. Using this you could examine the most common ways in
which each letter varies in the population, which can be an interesting thing
to study.

What I've described is building a statistical shape model from a boundary
point distribution model (PDM) of an object. This is typically done in the
context where you want to fit your model to new instances of the object, not
just for finding a mean, and are known as Active Shape Models. You can check
it out on wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shape_model). Here is one
(among many possible choices) describing generally how this is done:

[http://tinyurl.com/nxjwygn](http://tinyurl.com/nxjwygn)

There are other techniques for representing the shapes or computing statistics
that can produce better models, both from theoretical and practical points of
view, but this is generally the most common and would be my first choice if I
was going to do something like this. Of course, they could be doing something
much simpler like a simple averaging of the images (assuming the letters are
all in roughly the same place) as well.

------
cpeterso
I'm reminded of Kevan Davis' "Smaller Picture" web experiment that has been
running since 2002. Using a grid of random bits, readers could choose to vote
to flip a bit forming a given letter or picture. You can also view a time-
lapse animation. Unfortunately, the letters ("Typophile") are no longer
online. :(

[http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi](http://kevan.org/smaller.cgi)

------
sosuke
It uses your finger though, not the right source material.

------
6d0debc071
Wouldn't most people using the Latin alphabet be using cursive?

~~~
Jtsummers
In the US (no clue about the rest of the world) cursive has gone out of style.
Some schools don't even teach it anymore.

------
chris_wot
Does this average include all the 6 year olds of the world?

------
n6mac41717
Like my buddy Leo, I write in mirror image. Should I...

~~~
drdeca
Oh, neat. Are you left handed by any chance? Have you written about that
decision/habit anywhere that I could read? It sounds somewhat interesting.
e.g. Has it been inconvenient in many situations? Should I assume that that
implies that you can read mirror image just as well? Why/at what point did you
decide to start doing that?

Sorry if this sounds nosy, but I'm curious as to whether that would help avoid
smudging more easily for people who are left handed (which I think I've heard
can lead to avoiding certain types of pens?). (I personally am not left
handed)

Of course, don't feel obligated to answer.

