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Coding My Handwriting
- max_ 2y ago[flagged]
- ishqdehlvi 2y ago[dead]
- sour-taste 2y agoThe art at the end is quite beautiful. I wonder if the next step is putting this into a real font so that you can type with it in any program...
- ronsor 2y agoIf you already have curves, you can do that quite easily (maybe tediously, if you have to/want to do it manually).
- jacob019 2y agoYes, but she uses different glyphs depending on which letters are next to each other, not sure if that is supported.
- adeon13 2y agoYou could use ligatures: https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/glossary/ligature
- xp84 2y agoYeah, even "normal" fonts have ligatures (a couple common ones in many fonts are fl and ti though they don't appear to be used in the font being used to render this comment), so this is definitely no technical obstacle if one really wants a font. Obviously a bunch of work to create, but pretty cool to have!
- abdullahkhalids 2y agoFonts have supports for that. I know that the Urdu Jameel Noori Nastaleeq font, has hundreds (maybe more) of complete words hardcoded into the font.
- Ra8 2y agoArabic language letters change based on their position in the word. And there's multiple fonts for it.
- jacob019 2y agoIndeed, I love how she's blending technology and art here.
- Lalabadie 2y agoPlottable fonts are a thing! They're different from the "normal" font we think of, because they need to be a path to be traced instead of an outline to be filled.
- sandreas 2y agoThere is a very cool youtube video with something similar from Stuff Made Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw Was very fun to watch and he also explains the trials and errors, he did. There is also a link to a very interesting repository of handwriting synthesis: https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
- firewolf34 2y agoWow, that bit at the end really sold it. Very cool
- kibwen 2y agoI wonder if anyone's tried making a joined-up monospace font before.
- al_borland 2y agoIt looks like the Victor Mono italic font is semi-joined. https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/ https://rubjo.github.io/victor-mono/
- srik 2y agoToshi Omagari’s Tabulamore is the most gorgeous connected monospace font I’ve seen so far. The rest of the fonts in that tabular type collection aren’t connected but still pretty good fonts and they’re all steals at the price he has them listed. https://fonts.ilovetypography.com/fonts/tabular-type-foundry https://fonts.ilovetypography.com/fonts/tabular-type-foundry
- vessenes 2y agoType nerd reading the first part of the article "ugh oh my god the kerning oh ouch" Nerd reading the whole article and looking at the crazy cool letter-form art at the end "wowwww". Worth reading the whole article just to look at what an artist is doing with her tools from start to finish!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- betenoire 2y agothat's cool, I wish I had writing good enough to want my own font :) < 14.5, but if I switch this to a default size of 200, the point could be defined as 145, removing one character (the decimal place). I see a function called "adjust". I don't know font specs, but what if this were serialized differently? 0,{x:12.2,y:13.2} -> 0,[12.2,13.2] and transformed in the "adjust" function?
- naikrovek 2y agoLike any skill, handwriting can be improved with a bit of effort.
- Aeolun 2y agoI am really confused about the point of joining letters not matching up. The whole point of cursive to me is that you do not take your pen off the paper, so the way to join letters is built in. Author seems to have had issues because she’s not actually writing that way? That said, I really enjoy the whole rest of this writeup for just being the simplest possible way you can go about drawing a bunch of letters on screen without messing with fonts :)
- anamexis 2y agoThe point, which the author discusses at length, seems to be that different letter pairs match up in different ways, which needs to be accounted for.
- Aeolun 2y agoNo they don’t. At least in my cursive writing. Line from end of last letter to beginning of next letter is always correct, since you don’t take your pen off the paper. That’s not different between the code and the reality. If your letters look wrong it’s because you are starting them in the wrong place. Or because you take your pen off the paper. Letters either end in the bottom right or top right, and begin in the upper left. A straight line should always be correct. The issue with the a that looks like an e is because the author is trying to start writing her a on the left side of the character.
- anamexis 2y agoObviously the letters connect, but where a given letter ends depends on the following letter, and where a given letter starts depends on the previous letter. For example, in standard American cursive, b, o, v, and w have a top exit stroke, whereas the rest of the lowercase letters finish on the writing line. Combine this with the letter a, which has a top entry stroke, so the oa will join at the top, whereas ea will join from bottom to top.
- Aeolun 2y ago
- metadat 2y agoIt would be tough to model and/or mollify my handwriting in code or even ML because it really just depends on the day, and that's not usually a model input ;D (TL;DR: it's somewhat inconsistent)
- tombert 2y agoI am pretty convinced that coding my handwriting could be considered a one-way hash; there is no way to decipher what the hell I was trying to say when reading it.
- wriggler 2y agoSounds like a challenge! https://www.handwritingocr.com https://www.handwritingocr.com :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 3v1n0 2y agoSame here and even impossible to decrypt to myself after few hours
- tombert 2y agoIt's getting worse every time I am forced to write now too, since I do it so infrequently. I type nearly everything now, and I only write stuff with a pen (outside a signature) roughly two or three times a year, and every time I do it's more difficult to figure out what I actually wrote. I wish there were an easy way to print stuff on the go, and then I'd never have to use a pen again; maybe as we get to a paperless society that'll be the case.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoAwesome find. https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog The HN homepage has two brilliant articles from Amy. The website is now on my RSS Watchlist. There are quite a few interesting articles about the soothing existence between Art and Programming.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deanresin 2y agoThis is really cool. I would love to have that power of typing my handwriting.
- petepete 2y agoMy handwriting is crap, I'd much rather type hers!
- BanazirGalbasi 2y agoImproving your handwriting is pretty simple, it's just mildly time consuming. I journaled for a month and just focused on how I wrote each letter. At first it took me half an hour to fill an A5 page - but my handwriting looked so good! It only took a month for my muscle memory to pick up the adjustments, and now I can write quickly and legibly in cursive. I tell everyone who mentions bad handwriting the same thing. Buy a cheap journal, grab a pen you like, throw on something to listen to (music, a podcast, the news, a game stream, could be anything) and just write. What you write doesn't matter, just focus on putting down each letter exactly as you want it to look, and take your time.
- monknomo 2y agoI did the same thing, and really focused on opening up loops and getting ascenders and descenders straight, and it made a huge difference I just picked one of those all the letters in one sentence phrases and practiced on that during phone calls Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow
- asp_hornet 2y agoAn awesome project and great write up. This is what i come to HN to see.
- maCDzP 2y agoCool project using Processing, I’ve always wanted to play with that.
- mgaunard 2y agoWhat I find most shocking is that this is not cursive at all, just print with some kind of cursive joinery. s and z in particular look completely different in cursive, and b, f, l, k, and even h should also look quite different from this too. m and n are missing the extra arm. Do Americans genuinely not know what cursive looks like? I understand it's been removed from their education for decades. I do recognize however that the final result does indeed look quite close to natural print-style handwriting -- just don't call it cursive.
- skinbody 2y ago[dead]
- dhoe 2y agoIt's just not cursive. This is not controversial, there was a huge debate ~15 years ago when cursive instruction was removed from the curriculum in the US.
- xpe 2y agoWhat is the point of arguing definitions in this case? It seems you think one thing. The Wikipedia article says another. Are you claiming there is only one internally-consistent way of defining terms? Hopefully not. Do you think that definitions exist "out there" as objective realities? Hopefully not, as they exist in your head. On what basis is the definition in your head better than Wikipedia's? Or vice versa? Are you claiming definitions are determined by authorities? Hopefully not. What do you think the editors of dictionaries themselves have to say about that? As I understand it, they view themselves as collecting popular usage. Does popular usage serve as the "proper" and "fixed" definition? If so, does that mean usage {1, 10, 100, 1000} years ago was wrong? Are you making some kind of statistical claim; e.g. "most people would think that cursive is..."? The trope of "No, Thing X is not Y, see Source S" is rather myopic. There is often no disagreement once you speak clearly about what you _mean_.
- deleted 2y ago
- calini 2y agoThis would have been SO useful in school!
- naikrovek 2y agothis is awesome, and some excellent eye-bleach against the 3M article I just read.
- certik 2y agoBeautiful! I would like to see more cursive handwriting fonts. Here is my contribution from 2 years ago: https://certik.github.io/slabikar-otf/ https://certik.github.io/slabikar-otf/
- robertclaus 2y agoIt was interesting to read the comments about how many different cursive styles there are.
- kentosi-dw 2y agoThis is pretty amazing. I would love to get my hand-writing as a font!
- Xeyz0r 2y agoI'd be lucky to have it during my school time
- thefaux 2y agoThis is one of the best things I've seen on this site.
- mandibeet 2y agoAll the art at the end reminding me of a sea