5 ms·
Dijkstra's handwriting is quite charming. If you've never seen it, it's worth clicking the “EWD831” link at the top right to see the scan of the handwritten ori
by mayoff 10y ago
Dijkstra's handwriting is quite charming. If you've never seen it, it's worth clicking the “EWD831” link at the top right to see the scan of the handwritten original.
- logfromblammo 10y agoEgads, it looks like a handwriting font. I have never seen its match for legibility.
- benmcnelly 10y agoYes. In fact, the way he used hyphenation at the end of a line made me go back and look at each letter to make sure it wasn't a font. They are very consistent, but not exact clones. Makes me wonder if there are ways to make fonts that use multiple versions of a letter to make them appear to be more hand written. I bet you could program one of these to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce35RAMMQug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce35RAMMQug
- someemptyspace 10y agoThe OpenType [1] font format does allow for stylistic alternates [2], which is basically what you're suggesting, in that different forms of characters are included and can be selected based on rules (like ligatures) or I believe selected at random. When used with a handwriting font it does more closely resemble natural handwriting to the casual observer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Advanced_typography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Advanced_typography [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font#Character_variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font#Character_variants
- gumby 10y agoLast month I went to my parents' house and cleaned out a bunch of my old crud. Which included school notebooks and books back to 1980 (at which time I had access to computers and typed all my papers). I was shocked (as was my kid) at how clear and legible my old notebooks were. Nowadays I do write stuff but summarize it into the computer. I've tried various tools for automatic capture (e.g. livescribe) but they don't work that well. I realized that the probably would have worked great with my 35-years-ago handwriting.
- Sean1708 10y agoI do wonder whether given enough effort you could train an OCR program to be pretty good at recognising one person's handwriting. Like if you meticulously corrected the output and added those corrections to your training set, would it eventually be perfect (or close enough anyway) or would it hit some sort of fundamental limit?
- gumby 10y agoClearly some peoples' handwriting sure. Good handwriting recognizers take advantage of stroke recognition, which you can't do by OCRing after the fact. In addition my handwriting has become terrible. If I check my notes soon after writing them (within the same day) I can often tell by making out a few words and remembering what was being discussed when I was marking that part of the page :-(. A couple of days later I can barely understand them and longer than that I might as well forget it. I could probably get by making random marks on the paper! It's so sad, because when I was a scientist and had to maintain a lab notebook other people could easily read my notes (and they had to be clear for IP reasons). Or maybe I should look at it the other way: it's not sad, because it doesn't matter as much any more.
- nehushtan 10y agoHis handwriting has in fact been fontified.
- pjc50 10y agoI hate to disagree with Dijstra, but it looks like Comic Sans. It's not joined up; I think it's typical of draftsman's annotations on technical drawings rather than handwriting. (Charles Rennie Mackintosh has particularly lovely drafting letters; turned into the Hill House font.)
- blauditore 10y agoHe writes his name as something like Dÿkstra, but everywhere else it's referred to as Dijkstra. Does anyone know how this character (combination) works?
- Spare_account 10y agoI must be looking at a different document. The "EWD831" link on my device takes me to https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF which is a 2-colour scan of a typed page. Edit: I can't explain how, but the first time I downloaded that PDF I received a file which looked different. Here is a similar file from the same site which clearly resembles what led me to make the comment above: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd00xx/EWD77.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd00xx/EWD77.PDF So I apologise for this unnecessary diversion from the topic.
- pjc50 10y agoThat's definitely the write document and it's handwritten.
- robbrown451 10y agoHe does right nicely.
- andrepd 10y agoTongue in cheek? :P
- coldtea 10y agoThat's not typed.