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Show HN: Handwritten.js – Convert typed text to realistic handwriting
- alias-rahil 6y agoMany times I get university assignments that are compulsory to be submitted as handwritten document. Most of the information needed for the assignment is available on the internet so why not save time? Just make a text document and let handwritten.js do the writing part! example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js/master/screenshots/lorem-ipsum.jpeg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alias-rahil/handwritten.js...
- galkk 6y agoThis is insane busywork that I hated in college (xUSSR, 20+ years ago). I would scrutinize the example, though. I don't know how "clean" the documents are expected to be, but the picture is too uniform and too clean - no pen marks, etc.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoThat is pretty much the US experience also, most of grade and high school was spent copying information from projector slides onto paper. Guess it is an easy way to fill time, read everything off sentence by sentence, wait for everyone to stop writing, cover the sentences not being read so people who fall behind can’t catch up, and speed writers can’t get ahead. I’m very envious of my son, in his classes they distribute the materials via Google drive and spend the class time in discussion and working out problems.
- _ZeD_ 6y agoWriting things down is a known method of studying. I don't envy your son, he should still write to effectively study
- galkk 6y agoIn our case it created entire "industry" of rewriting lecture notes by hand (some lecturers required it)
- xmprt 6y agoIs it though? I've heard very often that lecturing in this fashion is the most inefficient way of transmitting information from a slide onto a notebook without being understood by anyone writing it. If you're processing what you're seeing and summarizing then maybe that works but I think what worked best for me was always asking questions about the material.
- grayhatter 6y agoHe says known method, not known good method.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fpgaminer 6y agoHandwriting machines are popular in China for this reason, from what I've heard.
- montroser 6y agoYou might consider turning this into an OpenType font including all the random alternates: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/26833/handwriting-font-that-at-random-picks-characters#27456 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/26833/hand...
- sjv 6y agoNon-statistical methods of imitating handwriting are always fairly easy to identify as synthetic due to the uniformity of strokes and unnatural kerning (among other things). Even methods which incorporate random variations don't hide these artifacts sufficiently well. In my opinion, the only way to generate synthetic handwriting which is convincingly real is to use statistical methods (i.e. machine learning) to model all variation which is present in real handwriting. I've implemented a neural network in javascript which does exactly this - https://seanvasquez.com/handwriting-generation/ https://seanvasquez.com/handwriting-generation/. You can play around with it and find a few weaknesses, but in general I find that it can produce handwriting which is indistinguishable from real handwriting.
- navanchauhan 6y agoIt’s giving blank output on iOS or is it because the model takes time to load? Also, is there any chance we can fine tune the model for each user by taking their handwriting in a predetermined template file?
- jsjohnst 6y agoWorks for me on iOS. Did you click the “write” button in the bottom right corner? It seems you have to tap it after any change in text or settings for it to update.
- navanchauhan 6y agoYup, I did use the write button. It works on my laptop though. I checked the console and it was indeed throwing an error "Error: Backend name 'webgl' not found in registry"
- jsjohnst 6y agoWere you using actual Safari or an app’s stripped down UIWebView? If Safari, then I’m guessing you have a content blocker that’s stopping access to WebGL.
- elorm 6y agoJust tried it, font looks great on paper. I don’t have too many uses for this, but I bet it’ll be pretty handy for people who are still addicted to reading notes from printed sheets. Great job.
- gibs0ns 6y agoIt would be great if this could output a generated font file, which can then be used on the web etc.
- sago 6y agoHow realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each? Sadly, the screenshot looks obviously artificial to me. Like handwriting fonts, I'd be very surprised if anybody thought it was really handwritten. It's not open source (because it is my handwriting (because my progressive MS means I can't do it manually)), but here's my hack: https://imgur.com/a/frqG0cu https://imgur.com/a/frqG0cu As sjv says above, there are still plenty of tells in mine. So I think this module is very unconvincing. Maybe I've spent too much time being finicky or am just being braggy (definitely not beyond me, sorry), but 'realistic'?
- senko 6y ago> How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each? Most of the people I know do this. Myself, I have never ever written with joined letters except when required to in school. I consider it a leftover from the era of fountain pens (which are terrible UX for me as a left-handed writing LTR languages). Even my signature is based on separate letters (tho blurred together as sigs usually do).
- sago 6y agoFascinating. Thanks for responding. Can I ask what age-group you/they are? And it sounds like you had to write joined-up at school. Why would you stop? Isn't it so much faster? I went to a snooty high school where fountain pens were compulsory (this was the 80s, not the 50s!). But writing was taught joined-up from pencils in infant school, from when you knew your whole alphabet. It never occurred to me to not join. It would have looked like a very small child's writing. Interesting though that has changed. My wife is a grade school teacher, and disagrees, but I totally think that teaching handwriting is a waste of time. I wasn't anywhere near as fast writing as typing. I would have been much more productive with a laptop in school. Anyway. I'm rambling now. Thanks for the response! I stand corrected.
- senko 6y agoI'm 41 - yeah we had learned both joined and "printed" (as we'd call them) letters, with the intention that for handwriting you'd use joined, but it was only required, for a bit, in lower grades in Croatian classes (ie. that'd be English classes in the US/UK/etc). That was some 33 years ago but I have an 8yr old now and that part of the curriculum is basically the same. Both then and now kids only need use pencils for this, thankfully :) For myself, written joined up is more effort and slower than just individual letters. I don't know if that's due to less practice in it, or due to left handed needing to push the pen(cil) more when writing in that style. I'm way faster touch typing (tho not on a screen keyboard!). If it were up to me, kids today would learn the easiest handwriting method (I believe that's individual letters) and typing, instead of two ways of writing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Always interesting to find how somr things I take for granted are done/seem elsewhere!
- foobaw 6y agohow about being able to use OCR to read real handwriting :) that would be truly amazing to accomplish with high precision
- porjo 6y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24170366
- elietoubi 6y agoLove it! Kinda remind me of the old Hacker News. I wish there were most post like this one.
- throwaway13337 6y agoI've noticed that I get junk mail now that appears hand written. They go so far as to depress the paper as if with pen in a convincing way. They seem indistinguishable except that they are marketing. I'm left wondering if there is some new innovation here combined with popularity in some marketing newsletter. I went looking for the device that could do this and have come up empty-handed. Does anyone know what could create such?
- ziari 6y agoBulk mail is often produced using a letterpress-style machine. Personalized mail, on the other hand, is usually "handwritten" using a pen plotter (e.g., AxiDraw). https://axidraw.com/ https://axidraw.com/
- wallawe 6y agoEven with the Axidraw, it's really hard to produce notes at scale. There are a handful of companies that have built out proprietary machines to do this e.g. https://www.handwrite.io https://www.handwrite.io (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder) but as far as I know there aren't any readily available for purchase.
- smabie 6y agoIs this different than a font?
- hombre_fatal 6y agoCan a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph? I know a font can define unique ligatures for every character combo, but that would still mean the same combos like "fi" always look the same. Nice thing about this low-tech solution is that it can be trivially scaled up to introduce its own ligatures yet pick from them randomly, just at the expense of chore work (making the images). Of course, at that point, it would be tempting to start looking for a more general solution.
- jordanwallwork 6y agoThere's a really good write up of this about the font Liza: https://underware.nl/case-studies/random-vs-clever/ https://underware.nl/case-studies/random-vs-clever/
- zimpenfish 6y ago> Can a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph? In theory, yes, OpenType Contextual Alternates can do this. See "Introducing variety" on this page: https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-at-work-contextual-alternates https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-at-work-co...
- wonderlg 6y agoI don’t get this project. This is nothing special, you can very easily spot that every T is identical. You might as well just use a handwritten font.
- lixtra 6y agoIt applies Cunningham's Law to find sjv‘s project above.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI like how trivial it is over the sort of machine-learning solutions I envisioned when I clicked into it. Does it not support a glyph? Just add it. Produces weird output? It's a bug, not a black box issue, just read the code. Want to use it or port it? It's just character substitution, go ahead. A fun twist on the idea would be to generate an SVG path for each character and then apply some morphing to the path so character strokes are unique.
- zerop 6y agoLooks good. Where can I use it?
- adamcccc 6y agoFeel free to checkout our super-realistic type to handwriting generation in greetings cards here: https://wuzci.com/product/we-make-a-great-pear-3/ https://wuzci.com/product/we-make-a-great-pear-3/
- 101008 6y agoProducing handwriting is a problem a group of people I belong to is facing. We work (free, on our free time), detecting forgeried signatures of a celebrity on eBay (forgeries that can go to thousdans of dollars). Forgers are not good imitating signatures, but they discovered how to create the celebrity handwriting using an autopen, which means is harder everyday to distinguish real ones from fake ones. Collectors are used to them - and we track eBay sellers, buyers, etc, so we have an idea of who is who, but people who just want to buy a signed book for a birthday present, may end paying thousdans of dollars but something fake that has no value. I see the importance of projects like this, but in the other hand, I cant help thinking that every piece of tech that imitates human behaviour can be used for bad.