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 fontforge.
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."
She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
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.
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.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
I do not know a single person who writes any cursive outside their signature.
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!
I tried it various pens and paper sizes and printer scales. And it suddenly worked but only if scanned at low res (200DPI).
Still I got a partially working font at the end
What I do is free and intended to be workshops for non-technical users to understand the power of technology rather than slamming it in their face.
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.
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.
Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.
Article links right to the font.
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.
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.
It was the first touchscreen I'd ever owned, and ran a special Tablet edition of XP. If I recall, it came with something similar to Microsoft Font Maker. On a roadtrip, a friend of mine scrawled in all the letters and presto, we had a new handwritten font.
The script looked kind of like a kid's handwriting. Over the years I used it (with permission) in various PDF's and doc files, mainly when I was showcasing how to fill in a form. It lent a nice, obvious distinction between the phrases that were part of the form template, and the portions that had been "handwritten" in. The last time I used it was to train volunteer firefighters how to fill in certain medical paperwork and equipment inspection logs.
It's nice to see it pop up in so many places!
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.
It’s your handwriting, why be so judgemental after all?
My current one I don't like it as much as the one I used to have. That old one would turn into a font and feel cool.
Thanks for picking this up! More to come. I'm working on adding color support right now.
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?
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?
"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
