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Thus got me curious, and I just spent a few minutes learning about OTF ligatures and alternatives, and apparently random is possible: https://graphicdesign.stac

Thus got me curious, and I just spent a few minutes learning about OTF ligatures and alternatives, and apparently random is possible: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/12818 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/12818 From what I've read, the technology exists to build a font that would be a pretty convincing handwriting alternative. It would take a lot of effort, as it would n involve several glyph alternatives for each character, several variations of dozens of ligatures (joined glyphs) and randomness for selection. You could even do variants like slightly different spacing/sizing/positioning (no one writes perfectly straight). Probably part of the issue is use case. Personal handwriting is kind of neat for a headline or call-out on a blog or something, but I wouldn't necessarily want to read a whole long post that way. I'm not really sure where else it would be useful - students trying to cheat on a "handwriting required" assignment, if that's even still a thing?

toast0 6y ago
Personal handwriting is used a lot in sales mailers. Except that it's totally fake, it looks like someone spent time on it. Same thing when they send you a letter with a post it on it. Looks real-ish.
jhpriestley 6y ago
If the goal is to produce a simulation of handwriting then a font (which is a simulation of a case of metal blocks) seems like a bad starting point. Better to simulate a pen moving along a curve and then vary curve parameters (acceleration etc).
- n3k5 6y ago
  > a font (which is a simulation of a case of metal blocks) In metal typesetting, a font is exactly a collection of metal blocks (which embody glyphs of a given design, size, and thickness). But on a computer, a font is a piece of software that renders text in a given typeface — simulating a pen moving along curves with varying parameters is entirely feasible. Not at all a bad starting point.
  - sachac 6y ago
    One of the things I want to do is to use autotrace centerline to get a basic stroke trace, and then manually tweak it so that drawing the glyphs makes sense. Then I can use that for SVG animations (there are Javascript tutorials for that), which I can use to help my kiddo learn how to write. (Whether I should teach her to forge my handwriting so early might be another matter... ;) )
aasasd 6y ago
That feature is what I was talking about. However, alternates seem to be more-or-less commonplace for usual ligatures or, lately, for gimmicks like symbols in ‘programming fonts’—but pretty rarely employed for variety and randomness. Whenever I see a ‘handwritten’ font, I spot identical characters even in short runs of text. As far as I (vaguely) know, alternates aren't intended to produce true randomness. So instead I would throw in sheer quantity of alternate glyphs, to put identical ones further apart and shuffle other ones more. With the method from the posted article, producing the characters doesn't seem to take much effort. And the characters there aren't joined, so no need for traditional ligatures. Lastly, with a large number of alternates, kerning would add a lot of work—but then again, you don't really kern when writing with a pen, do you?
n3k5 6y ago
> random is possible Thank you! This answers one of my questions. But what about procedural generation — a new glyph every time, e.g. an interpolation of multiple prototypical shapes as described in that SE answer … something something eigenspace? I know PostScript is Turing complete and thus assume a PS font can pull this off; does this extend to OpenType? Apparently yes: OpenType is pretty much a superset of PS (and TrueType, of course). Just searched the web for “opentype turing complete” and the second result led right back to HN[0]: > OpenType is technically Turing Complete, however the usual way is to just cycle through letter form variations. — danielvf So this answers my other question? Hold up, check this out: Another answer from that SE post you linked mentions the Beowolf [sic] font[1]. > FF Beowolf came about at the end of the dark and murky 1980s when Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland found a way to hack PostScript fonts. When printed, each point in each letter on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a shaken, distraught appearance. > […] > while it worked fine (if a tad slow) through most of the 1990s, FF Beowolf was eventually barred from performing its PostScript magic: pesky things like printer drivers and operating systems learned to ignore the aberrations. FF Beowolf seemed destined to end up a mere memory. OpenType technology brought new hope, cutting new pathways in the type-tech continuum, which would eventually lead to a new generation of random fonts. Purists and typographic philosophers will be quick to point out that these OT fonts do not actually alter their shape in the printer as their forebearers did. Instead they make use of a kind of pre-programmed randomness: each glyph in each font (except R20) has ten alternate forms and a massive Faustian brain to control the mayhem. What a rabbit hole! In this case, it seems we're back to “several variations”, but I still don't know whether full-on procedural generation is generally workable with OpenType. Does more modern technology's “ignorance” of “the aberrations” have to do with caching of glyph shapes? Is the Turing completeness curtailed to protect against DoS, decompression/logic bombs? By the way, the type specimen on the FF Beowolf page I linked features an amusingly à propos quote: > Im Rausch schreiben, nüchtern gegenlesen. Write intoxicated, proofread sober. > It would take a lot of effort, as it would n involve several glyph alternatives for each character, several variations of dozens of ligatures (joined glyphs) and randomness for selection. Agreed, it's a silly amount of work — if you did it the brute force way. Which is exactly why I'm interested in smart procedural generation. You mentioned that such a style wouldn't be appropriate for running text, so infinite variability isn't important (and use cases where it would be important can be rather questionable). However, even a curt headline often contains multiple Es or Ts or other Aoin Shrdlus[2]. And because the more appropriate use cases tend to involve above-average font sizes, word wrapping can conspire to place identical glyphs in close proximity. I think one wouldn't have to be a huge typography nerd to find one's suspension of disbelief in the pretense of hand lettering kind of shattered in the countenance of such a similitude. Not to mention homogeneous digraphs. Having just a few alternate forms of each character totally solves that; no need for ligatures. But a font that gets by on just one prototype for each glyph would be even more efficient (less labour intensive). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16376485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16376485 [1] https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Probably part of the issue is use case. Style alone seems like a fun reason.
sachac 6y ago
That's pretty cool! I think that would be fun to try out. Thanks for digging that up!

toast0 6y ago

Personal handwriting is used a lot in sales mailers. Except that it's totally fake, it looks like someone spent time on it. Same thing when they send you a letter with a post it on it. Looks real-ish.

jhpriestley 6y ago

If the goal is to produce a simulation of handwriting then a font (which is a simulation of a case of metal blocks) seems like a bad starting point. Better to simulate a pen moving along a curve and then vary curve parameters (acceleration etc).

n3k5 6y ago
> a font (which is a simulation of a case of metal blocks) In metal typesetting, a font is exactly a collection of metal blocks (which embody glyphs of a given design, size, and thickness). But on a computer, a font is a piece of software that renders text in a given typeface — simulating a pen moving along curves with varying parameters is entirely feasible. Not at all a bad starting point.
- sachac 6y ago
  One of the things I want to do is to use autotrace centerline to get a basic stroke trace, and then manually tweak it so that drawing the glyphs makes sense. Then I can use that for SVG animations (there are Javascript tutorials for that), which I can use to help my kiddo learn how to write. (Whether I should teach her to forge my handwriting so early might be another matter... ;) )

aasasd 6y ago

That feature is what I was talking about. However, alternates seem to be more-or-less commonplace for usual ligatures or, lately, for gimmicks like symbols in ‘programming fonts’—but pretty rarely employed for variety and randomness. Whenever I see a ‘handwritten’ font, I spot identical characters even in short runs of text. As far as I (vaguely) know, alternates aren't intended to produce true randomness. So instead I would throw in sheer quantity of alternate glyphs, to put identical ones further apart and shuffle other ones more. With the method from the posted article, producing the characters doesn't seem to take much effort. And the characters there aren't joined, so no need for traditional ligatures. Lastly, with a large number of alternates, kerning would add a lot of work—but then again, you don't really kern when writing with a pen, do you?

n3k5 6y ago

> random is possible Thank you! This answers one of my questions. But what about procedural generation — a new glyph every time, e.g. an interpolation of multiple prototypical shapes as described in that SE answer … something something eigenspace? I know PostScript is Turing complete and thus assume a PS font can pull this off; does this extend to OpenType? Apparently yes: OpenType is pretty much a superset of PS (and TrueType, of course). Just searched the web for “opentype turing complete” and the second result led right back to HN[0]: > OpenType is technically Turing Complete, however the usual way is to just cycle through letter form variations. — danielvf So this answers my other question? Hold up, check this out: Another answer from that SE post you linked mentions the Beowolf [sic] font[1]. > FF Beowolf came about at the end of the dark and murky 1980s when Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland found a way to hack PostScript fonts. When printed, each point in each letter on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a shaken, distraught appearance. > […] > while it worked fine (if a tad slow) through most of the 1990s, FF Beowolf was eventually barred from performing its PostScript magic: pesky things like printer drivers and operating systems learned to ignore the aberrations. FF Beowolf seemed destined to end up a mere memory. OpenType technology brought new hope, cutting new pathways in the type-tech continuum, which would eventually lead to a new generation of random fonts. Purists and typographic philosophers will be quick to point out that these OT fonts do not actually alter their shape in the printer as their forebearers did. Instead they make use of a kind of pre-programmed randomness: each glyph in each font (except R20) has ten alternate forms and a massive Faustian brain to control the mayhem. What a rabbit hole! In this case, it seems we're back to “several variations”, but I still don't know whether full-on procedural generation is generally workable with OpenType. Does more modern technology's “ignorance” of “the aberrations” have to do with caching of glyph shapes? Is the Turing completeness curtailed to protect against DoS, decompression/logic bombs? By the way, the type specimen on the FF Beowolf page I linked features an amusingly à propos quote: > Im Rausch schreiben, nüchtern gegenlesen. Write intoxicated, proofread sober. > It would take a lot of effort, as it would n involve several glyph alternatives for each character, several variations of dozens of ligatures (joined glyphs) and randomness for selection. Agreed, it's a silly amount of work — if you did it the brute force way. Which is exactly why I'm interested in smart procedural generation. You mentioned that such a style wouldn't be appropriate for running text, so infinite variability isn't important (and use cases where it would be important can be rather questionable). However, even a curt headline often contains multiple Es or Ts or other Aoin Shrdlus[2]. And because the more appropriate use cases tend to involve above-average font sizes, word wrapping can conspire to place identical glyphs in close proximity. I think one wouldn't have to be a huge typography nerd to find one's suspension of disbelief in the pretense of hand lettering kind of shattered in the countenance of such a similitude. Not to mention homogeneous digraphs. Having just a few alternate forms of each character totally solves that; no need for ligatures. But a font that gets by on just one prototype for each glyph would be even more efficient (less labour intensive). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16376485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16376485 [1] https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> Probably part of the issue is use case. Style alone seems like a fun reason.

sachac 6y ago

That's pretty cool! I think that would be fun to try out. Thanks for digging that up!