HN

Comments (96)

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  ghrl
  There used to be multiple tools like this from different websites, but they were all bought by Calligraphr to redirect to them instead, giving them an effective monopoly and letting them charge subscription fees for generating fonts over the limits of the free version. I used to create two fonts and merge them with FontForge to get a complete usable font.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.
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  bovermyer
  Personally, I like that my handwriting has tiny inconsistencies in every character and rarely-repeated flourishes.I don't want to manufacture something that looks like it, but loses the soul of it.
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  mft_
  A related but different approach I liked was taken by Amy Goodchild, who is an artist that uses code for her creations.She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
• rustyhancock
  My experience was a bit of a disaster.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!
• deposittag
  I really wanted to make this work with my daughter. She's 9yo, and she filled out the form, and we scanned it with a real scanner. I'll admit we didn't have a felt tip pen, but we did have a grea black ink gell pen.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.
• jdelman
  I remember there was a service that would do this by mail in the 90s. You had to fill out a card with each block letter and then it cost a few hundred dollars. I wasn't even a teenager then so I couldn't afford it, but I always wanted to do it.
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  simonebrunozzi
  Tangentially related: anyone has suggestions on an "automated" way to "print" pages with a typewriter? If you want to have papers that "look" as typed with a typewriter, as opposed to printed with laser printers and such.
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  axegon_
  Awesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin
• world2vec
  Turning my handwriting into a font is akin to encrypt the text :-D
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  xmattx
  Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.
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  Thomashuet
  Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.
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  easton
  Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.
• mattv8
  Had to dig to find this but back in 2009 I was bored so I made a font based of my handwriting. I had a Wacom tablet and used this font creator- I'm pretty sure it was called Fontographer. Anyways it's still floating around the Internet: https://fontmeme.com/fonts/mattfont-font/
• al_borland
  30 years ago there were ads in SkyMall for a service that did this. I always really wanted to do it as a kid. That desire has faded over time, but those ads really stuck in my mind.
• zimpenfish
  I've used iFontMaker for this on the iPad - quite amusing to be able to select my own monospaced font for terminals (even if it is just "old man traced over Courier Prime badly".)Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.
• vaylian
  The instructions say that rows 2 and 3 in the template can be either lower or upper case. How does the website determine the case in those rows? Does it simply check if row 1 looks different from the other rows?
• psychoslave
  Not sure it would work in my case. I do love to take the very different freedom it brings. For example the mid bars of a t is often taken as an opportunity to go through above the whole word. But I wouldn't do it every single time, as it would feel too much overload.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.
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  SAI_Peregrinus
  I'm dysgraphic with a small essential tremor, and often write in a hybrid between cursive & block gothic. I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them for each letter to look like my handwriting.My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.
• TomMasz
  I did this years ago with a site whose name I can't recall. I still use the results for certain things, but it's certainly not a font you can use for everything.
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  micw
  Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?
• jedberg
  The last thing this world needs is my handwriting spreading beyond my local community!But I would have loved to use this to capture my kid's kindergarten handwriting. Maybe I still have a sample around here...
• nzxt210
  Meo
• karmasimida
  Well I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it
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  alsodumb
  My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)
• andsoitis
  I write in cursive. Does this work for that?
• himata4113
  Text encryption, I like it!
• mock-possum
  Odd that so many commenters see to be declaring proudly or ruefully that their handwriting is bad, and ‘no one wants it’ or ‘the world doesn’t need to see it’ or similar…It’s your handwriting, why be so judgemental after all?
• otikik
  Not great for doctors
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  mittermayr
  Amazing way to show-case a tool (all in-browser, can be done so simply), super disappointed in the result. I took care writing all the letters, but when I looked at the generated font, even some of the corner markers ended up as letters!?Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?
• feverzsj
  That'll be the ugliest font.
• scotty79
  A sign of how irrelevant handwriting became is that there are no popular AI models that aim at cloning it, even though it should be fairly easy.
• catoc
  A wise doctor once typed…
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  ixvo
  This works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.
• amigocesar
  What about tildes, accents, cedilles?á é í ó ú?
• catlover76
  [dead]
• ixvo
  [flagged]
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  nacozarina
  new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !
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  jruohonen
  The idea is cool, but, well:"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."