
Autopen - tosh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen
======
spapas82
I work in a very bureocratic work and for some years I needed to sign a lot of
papers each day. Actually all these was prepared by an assistant but need to
had my signature because of the position I had.

To solve this I had made a stamp with my name _and_ signature. I had visited a
shop that sells stamps, put my signature on a paper and after some days they
presented me a wooden stamp with a perfect copy of my signature on it. So when
the papers needed signing I gave it to my assistant and she just stamped my
sign to all the needed papers!

Of course that means that she could also sign other things as myself but I
trusted her and was careful to sometimes glimpse at the papers that were
signed (they all had the same template).

I have to confess though that it was really crazy how easy it was to copy my
signature and have a way to sign every kind of paper. I presume that if some
signature of me was in a non proper place I could complain and a specialist
would recognise it...

~~~
londons_explore
Signatures are not really anti-forgery proof as most people expect...

Instead they are protected by law. If you sign something claiming to be
someone else, you have broken the law.

That's why credit cards required a signature for a long time, yet nobody ever
checked the signatures on the receipt vs the card. It isn't hard to fake
someone else's signature, but doing so is a crime. Using someone else's card
without a signature would just be a breach of the T&C's, but not a crime.

~~~
baddox
You’d think the law could just say that you can’t pretend (via any mechanism,
a signature or otherwise) to be someone else in order to receive some material
gain.

~~~
tialaramex
In the UK at least that is indeed a crime and I assume it's in one of the
model criminal codes in the US. "Theft by deception" \- basically you need to
show intent to deceive and thereby permanently deprive someone of something of
value.

So "Lied about going to the same high school, she gave me her number" doesn't
cut it, but "Showed my brother's ID to the dealer, drove away with a car" is
definitely a crime.

------
Multicomp
I thought this was a genius idea. I wanted to have one for myself.

So I've been trying to do a "journal printer" a few years now, using the
Chinese mass produced version of the diy pen plotter.

The goal is simple, to "print" text to an arbitrary piece of paper inside a
journal, with an arbitrary font and size. Perhaps a future stretch goal would
be to ad basic line art printing skills.

Why? So I can copy to permanent pages dozens of 2fa codes, car vins, whatever
I want to capture in digital form and have it persisted in analog form in a
known volume of works that is much less likely to be lost vs a single piece of
paper.

Couple that with dictation and a handwriting font and I can write an entire
letter using on the right voice, and yet have the results come out looking
like the entire letter was handwritten, or at least a neater handwriting than
I can actually produce. One copy goes in the journal, one copy goes on a
single sheet of paper to be mailed.

So far I have found that it is incredibly difficult to make a pen plotter draw
arbitrary text files or anything more than a single image with the basic
software that came with the pain Potter I have.

I'm not certain if buying a nicer pen plotter would make this process easier
or not, but frankly I haven't seen anyone else trying to do when I'm trying to
do, they seem to want to make random line fractals or arbitrary images, which
is fine but just not my use case.

~~~
IgorPartola
I am surprised you are having so much trouble with the software. What you
might want to look into is how 3D printers and hobby CNC machines are
controlled. GRBL for example is a standard CNC firmware that can run on an
Arduino Uno and can control a 2.5 axis machine like a plotter easily. Combine
that with some cheap stepper motors, GT2 timing belts and pulleys, a couple of
endstop switches, and mounted on a 2020 aluminum frame and you got yourself a
plotter that can do pretty much anything. Depending on the plotter you already
have it could be as simple as reflashing the firmware on its controller.

Another option is Marlin which runs on slightly beefier ATMega Arduinos. This
is what’s used in most 3D printers. And of course you could just buy a 3D
printer and mount a pen on it.

The beauty of this approach is that you use a slicer to plan all the moves of
the plotter on a much more powerful computer and the plotter just gets the
GCode instructions of where to move each axis.

The software you want is something that can generate an SVG out of your
handwriting font, then convert that GCode. Inkscape can do that and I suspect
it might be able to be driven from the command line. You’d need to script up a
way to feed it speech to text, and for it to fit stuff onto pages, but that
just sounds like a good weekend. Check this out for inspiration:
[https://medium.com/@urish/how-to-turn-your-3d-printer-
into-a...](https://medium.com/@urish/how-to-turn-your-3d-printer-into-a-
plotter-in-one-hour-d6fe14559f1a)

Edit: second Google link for “3D printer plotter” has a reference to a stand-
alone Python script that can take in any path-only SVG and spit out GCode.
[https://www.instructables.com/id/Use-3D-Printer-As-a-
Plotter...](https://www.instructables.com/id/Use-3D-Printer-As-a-
Plottercutter/)

~~~
londons_explore
I think OP is saying "without writing my own code and scripts to tie a bunch
of tools together, I can't seem to do what I want".

Which is true. There is no software I can see today which you can open a text
file, select a font, choose a page size, and click "Print" and have a plotter
do the drawing, just like Microsoft Word can do with a regular printer.

In a way this is because 3D printers and plotters decided to have their own
custom tooling and protocols (GCode isn't really a standard, since it is so
machine specific), unlike printers where a PDF file will print on any printer
pretty much.

~~~
Multicomp
This. I will review parent reply links with interest but yes, until I can tie
this entire operation together, the goals remain out of reach.

~~~
IgorPartola
Best of luck and I hope you find a solution. As I mentioned in my other
comment, the only part of this I don’t know for sure is how to convert a
written page to a path only SVG. I suspect GraphicMagick can do it. If so,
your toolchain will be speech to text (pick your favorite one or use e.g. an
Amazon Echo and a custom skill), text to HTML (with a stylesheet that sets the
correct page size and your custom handwriting font), HTML to PDF using
wkhtmltopdf, PDF to path only SVG using GM, SVG to GCode using the script from
my link above or another similar tool, and OctoPrint or similar to drive the
plotter remotely. You could likely bang this out in a day with a bash script.

I am actually curious, how much would you pay for a complete solution like
this? Also this is definitely inspiring me to add a pen attachment to my 3D
printer and try some plotter stuff.

~~~
Multicomp
Im probably a cheapskate. Hence me buying the Chinese knock off vs the actual
axidraw or similar.

But if I can feed a page size in inches with 0.5 inch margins on all sides and
have a given PDF or text doc printed, I'd pay 300-450 for a given product if
it existed, if only to have this project off my plate.

I know if it ever did exist it would be 2k like one of those fancy fully
automatic book scanners but I suppose I could dream

------
romwell
I was very excited by this concept, so I made my own autopen from a 3D
printer.

Custom handwriting font and all that jazz.

Here it is in glorious action:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=V45cj0-GQyQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=V45cj0-GQyQ)

The font and text editor are work in progress, but hope to post them on HN one
day soon.

~~~
thunderbong
This is not an autopen, this just writes something out in your handwriting.

There are, in fact, softwares to create fonts from one's own handwriting [0].

From my understanding of the Wikipedia article, the autopen is for signatures.

[0]: [https://www.calligraphr.com/en/](https://www.calligraphr.com/en/)

~~~
hcta
A generic plotter would seem to be a strict generalization of an autopen...

------
wayneftw
When I was in the 4th or 5th grade my Dad, who ran a small business, had a
rubber stamp of his signature that my Mom used while acting as secretary.

I loved that thing since I used it for a while to sign any papers that the
teacher sent home when I didn't do my homework. It was all good until back to
school night one year when my teacher handed a stack of those signed papers to
my Mom.

I think I got grounded for a whole summer that year.

------
Beldin
Tangentially related: does anyone here happen to know if celebrities use 2
different signatures (one for fans, one for signing official documents)? Or do
they give away their actual signature every time?

If the latter, I'm really wondering how that is not widely abused. Sure, it's
illegal (as remarked above). But for celebrities that give out massive amounts
of fan signatures, you'd think one of them would eventually be abused.

~~~
dhosek
I'm not really a celebrity, but I have given a couple of autographs (when I
published a typography magazine). I made a conscious decision to not use my
regular signature and instead use a calligraphic logotype instead. I have a
version of that as the favicon of my writing website.

------
twic
There's a link to the article on a related device, the LongPen:

> The LongPen is a remote signing device conceived of by writer Margaret
> Atwood in 2004 and debuted in 2006. It allows a person to remotely write in
> ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet and a robotic hand.

> The system was used by Conrad Black, who was under arrest, to "attend" a
> book signing event without leaving his home.

Atwood is Canadian. Black is Canadian. Canada also makes the robot arms used
on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. What is it with
Canadians and robot arms?!

------
082349872349872
Jefferson's pantograph goes back well before his time. Also, by use of a
pantograph (2 axes of translation) between two linked turntables (rotation),
one could enlarge maquettes for finishing sculpture that had been roughly
pointed.

of possible interest to those who have only calculated areas in GIS or CAD
tools:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter)

~~~
dhosek
It works the other way too. American Type Founders used a pantograph to cut
matrices from large engraved patterns. Frederick Goudy realized that engraved
metal patterns weren't strictly necessary and cut his own patterns from thick
paper for cutting matrices.

------
fredley
Do modern systems encode a degree of variability? Either by way of slightly
varying the parameters of the underlying vectors (beziers?) to mimic the
slight variability in speed and curvature of a true signature, or by analysing
100 input samples to generate a wider variability of outputs?

Seems like this would add to the ambiguity over provenance.

~~~
maxmunzel
You could probably use some form of DMP [0] for this. It basically learns
movements by viewing them as the difference from a spring-damper system. This
allows all kinds of adaptations.

[0]
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5152423](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5152423)

------
surround
Related: There are six surviving signatures by Shakespeare, and they are all
different.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_handwriting#Sign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare's_handwriting#Signatures)

------
ilamont
We had one of these things in the back room of an alumni development office
that I worked in >15 years ago, which was used to sign appeals and thank-you
letters to big donors. It could only duplicate the university president's
signature, whose office was about a 15-minute walk away and was usually too
busy to sign stuff like this.

I was surprised when I first saw it, because I assumed printing technology
could do a pretty good job of approximating a signature. I was told nothing
could copy pen on high-grade paper.

------
scurvy
Using autopens worked out well for Laszlo in the Frito Lay giveaway (Real
Genius). Enter as many times as you like,no purchase necessary.

~~~
082349872349872
Like many things in Real Genius, it had some basis in fact: as I heard the
story, the sweepstakes stuffing was done via line printer, when they were
leading- instead of trailing-edge technology.

