
Turn your handwriting into a font - dclaysmith
http://www.myscriptfont.com/
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WalterBright
One of the charms of a printed book is the imperfection of the fonts and the
impressions of the fonts. Each 'a' impression is slightly different - maybe a
little higher, a little lower, a little blotchier, etc. But if I read an
ebook, the letters are always identical.

I've often thought that if I wrote an ebook reader, I'd use a font that mimics
the imperfections in printed works. I'd have maybe 20-30 different 'a' images,
and select one randomly and then 'jitter' its positioning a bit.

I'd also use a background that looks like paper, rather than the perfect white
or sepia ones current readers do. Heck, it would be easy enough to scan a few
dozen blank sheets of paperback paper, and then pick one randomly for each
page.

~~~
WalterBright
I should add that I buy paperbacks regularly, often paying more for them than
the ebook. I then run 'em through the scanner and read the scanned book on my
tablet. I just like the imperfect look of a scanned paperback page than the
perfect ebooks. I also like the paperback formatting better than the auto-flow
ebook layouts.

I figure I get the best of ebook and hardcopy this way!

~~~
justinpombrio
Plus then you own the scan and don't have to worry about DRM.

> I then run 'em through the scanner

Does that take a long time? Do you have a setup to make it faster than
scanning page by page?

~~~
WalterBright
It takes about 5-10 minutes for a typical paperback. A fat one might take 20
minutes tops. I am a fidgety person and cannot sit still, so I keep my hands
busy and scan a book while I watch the news on TV. I use a stack slicer and a
Fujitsu duplex scanner.

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corysama
Has anyone managed to assemble a workable font based on Dijkstra's
handwriting? Last I checked, there we few attempts but they were all missing
characters.

[http://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-
handw...](http://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-handwriting/)

~~~
jenhsun
[http://ufonts.com/fonts/dijkstra.html](http://ufonts.com/fonts/dijkstra.html)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
That link went straight to malware for me on Android; downvoted.

~~~
Arnavion
Yes, it has a bunch of ad scripts that cover the page with an invisible flash
element. Clicking it generates popups and popunders. Pity you're being
downvoted.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Ah, yes, it actually triggers when I scroll.

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kazinator
Better do it five or six times, and then switch among all those captured fonts
in the document, to have some variation in the letter forms. Otherwise your
document will be the typographical equivalent of a drum track from 80's synth
pop. Ooh, hit me with that bit-for-bit identical snare drum sample again:
snap, snap, ...

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gravypod
This might be a great crypto tool! I can turn my hand writing into a font and
then keep printed hard copies of all of my data! No one will be able to read
it!

~~~
joshschreuder
Security through obscurity.

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parennoob
Are there potential security concerns here?

I know not many people use handwritten letters any more, but this potentially
gives this company a complete sample of your handwriting, which they can then
use for whatever purpose they want.

~~~
PuffinBlue
If you give it a try you'll see it doesn't work well and it's nothing like
cursive or 'natural' handwriting. The sheet you have to fill in changes your
natural handwriting fairly dramatically (it did for me at least).

~~~
elcapitan
Because in cursive writing, the letters are connected - that's something that
works in high quality, high effort script fonts. They way they do it is to use
OpenType replacement features for various combinations of letters. For
example, there are a bunch of a's in one font, and when the OpenType system
detects a+n, it chooses the a that is drawn to connect with the n. There also
may be different versions of the letters, so that the text gets more rhythm
(like naturally written).

It would actually be an interesting machine learning application not only to
recognize letters from an actual sample (say a document in cursive writing),
but also to understand how the letters connect and then create a cursive font
based on that.

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Crito
Neat idea, but what's the point of a font that nobody can read?

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phaed
Which are the inner auxiliary lines? The black grid lines? The light square
box lines? The inner light horizontal lines?

~~~
developer2
The light square box would make the most sense.

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alfanick
While idea is neat, there are artists who design fonts based on your
hardwriting with better quality. While I would like sometimes to use my
handwriting digatally, you cannot create "real" effect without having every
ligature (two, three leters) written in the template.

Just a thought, instead of having every ligature you could let a camera/tablet
observe how you are writing certain "test sentences" and turn this data into
autoencoder neural network that would turn any text into "your handwriting".

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soylentcola
Huh. I remember having a program that did this on my old Toshiba convertible
laptop back in 2005. I got it on eBay for fairly cheap and it was neat to have
a pretty lightweight (for the time) laptop with a screen you could flip around
and use as a tablet with active digitizer.

Wonder if I still have the old font file floating around anywhere.

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conchy
There used to be a company that offered something like this in MacWorld and
PCMagazine in the early 90's.

~~~
sehugg
SkyMall too.

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Aelinsaar
You know, I could see this being a fun tool for people who are into
calligraphy to make their own fonts. I'm not sure that just "Turn my natural
handwriting into a font" is what this does though. I tried it, and it worked
much more cleanly with calligraphy.

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treystout
In case you want something a bit more real than what font engines offer, check
out [https://handwriting.io](https://handwriting.io) (disclosure: I work
there)

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khedoros
I've made a font of my handwriting in the past. I used a similar template,
scanned it, and used a TrueType font creation program. It auto-converted the
image into vectorized curves, A selected the parts of each curve, and put each
glyph into a box. In each box, you could change the letter spacing, kerning on
all the sides, alignment of the pieces (dot over the 'i', for instance).

I went through probably a dozen iterations, tweaking the spacing and alignment
until it looked fairly natural. Now, I wonder if there was a way to automate
that, or if the fonts created with this site take a little manual tweaking as
a final polishing step.

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ecesena
I can see an application for creating a company/product logo. I'd use it for
my side projects.

