Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.
take g and f and c for examples
g and f are about the same height but different ofsets, and c would look like a capital C if scaled to the same size as g and f. (we probably want to auto adjust scales to match more evenly unless the text is on a grid (in case removing the grid is the difficulty)
These are just the difficulty I found by trying to make a more automated input to fontcraft.
Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.
"Can I buy your company?"
"No."
Now I have little snippets of history and unique handwriting, albeit simplistic and imperfect, that remind me of my loved ones passed in a unique way.
She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
I don't want to manufacture something that looks like it, but loses the soul of it.
edit: basically what DANmode replied to the same parent. I did this 10 years ago while running for political office.
It's worth noting that it's only at the end that it turns out you have 3 options for using the rows (you can't say use row 1&2 caps but row 3 lowercase)
For whatever reason it really struggled to detect the cross hairs. It thought the top right cross hair was the O.
I had intensely compress the black white range to make it detect at all.
What should it look like btw?
Also even though it detected A thru F great it kind of fell to pieces down the page suggesting that the registration isn't good enough to detect each block. Maybe let people mark the cross hairs manually?
More registration marks and ones that are more distinct than cross hairs would likely help. I used a high quality scan! So registration should have been muche asier than a photo.
I don't really know what's wrong!
But something about the way the app applied the threshold on the scanned image, made the letters really broken. Maybe having a thicker pen would be the solution.
Article links right to the font.
We've done all we can for toast0. But he'll have a secretary so it'll be fine
I never did get to have a secretary, but thanks to COVID learning losses, I do manage to have a lot better penmanship than about half of kids going into high school this year. :)
She didn't lecture but she did tell stories about her farm, hunting, and occasionally some science. We could ask questions and tell stories if we finished copying the notes before everyone else was done. So, one of the takeaways from her class was getting very efficient and neat with my writing. I tried to write in a clean all caps and eventually learned which strokes were best for speed and spacing. I still use that hand-font and I always think of her sitting on the wall radiator laughing through some story of trying to fix a bad situation.
My elder brother had (simplifying the story a lot) such bad handwriting that they let him type his year 12 exams, turning a possible disadvantage into a frankly unfair advantage, especially in English, where being able to output four times as fast is valuable. Wish I could have done that.
Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name.
(Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)
Controlling access to stationary, prescription pads, and the office’s fax machine is one part. Making it hard to forge the doctor’s handwriting is another.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift
One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.
My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.
I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian (cursive and print examples are here)
Seems odd, in hindsight, to teach hand-written prose uses a different set of symbols than when its typed out
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...
Understandable.
Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.
There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.
I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.
My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.
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.
And learning to write in 'fonts' (hands) like block-print is still a form of calligraphy.
But I would have loved to use this to capture my kid's kindergarten handwriting. Maybe I still have a sample around here...
Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?
It’s your handwriting, why be so judgemental after all?
Kids are being taught cursive again. Texas has been doing it again for awhile.
No idea why they stopped teaching it for a few years, kind of messed those kids up.
How do people have a signature if they don't know cursive?
Do they just print it twice lol?
Signatures aren't cursive, they're a curated, custom art piece.
Arguably even signatures are being replaced with digital agreements. Just click "I Agree [and we'll use other proof than the squiggly that it was you because your digital squiggly is uselessly different every time]".
á é í ó ú?
Signed, Mom
S I G N E D , M O M
"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."
If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?
Browser can be treated as loader of code to be executed only locally with Local only data.
i hate js, but it's doable
