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FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font
- jruohonen 7mo agoThe idea is cool, but, well: "No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."
- wongarsu 7mo agosound great
- phoronixrly 7mo agoAre you implying that the lack of data harvesting is a disadvantage?
- codetiger 7mo agoIt not a disadvantage but a rare trait nowadays.
- iberator 7mo agowell makes sense if JavaScript is run 100% locally. Browser can be treated as loader of code to be executed only locally with Local only data. i hate js, but it's doable
- Wowfunhappy 7mo agoYour post makes it sound like you consider this a bad thing?
- catoc 7mo agoI don’t see the downside here. If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?
- vaylian 7mo agoThe 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?
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoYou configure that in the Configuration section. ;)
- Thomashuet 7mo agoUnfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.
- Daneel_ 7mo agoI think that might be generational. I don’t know anyone under 40 who writes in cursive. I certainly don’t.
- tazjin 7mo agoIt is probably country and language dependent, I think. I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian), and for other languages I personally also write in cursive (and learnt that in school). I'm in my 30s.
- jech 7mo ago> I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D0%B8%D1%88%D0%B8%D1%88%D1%8C_in_russian_cursive.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D... Understandable.
- d1sxeyes 7mo agoOP double negated - cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages. Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular. There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
- jech 7mo ago> cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages. I know. I always feel utterly embarrassed when Russian-speaking friends write down a movie title for me, and I have to ask them to rewrite it in block capitals.
- zimpenfish 7mo agoI'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.
- nacozarina 7mo agonew signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !
- ghrl 7mo agoThere 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.
- Y_Y 7mo agoAh, the Overleaf model. Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.
- okamiueru 7mo agoSeems like open source is the way to defeat this. Anyone can easily create a competing service, which they then have to buy out, but the cost of setting up a new one is minimal. Interesting business model that feeds on anti-competitive businesses.
- c7b 7mo agoInterestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak to how well the open source version works. [0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf
- nbernard 7mo agoIIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.
- vidarh 7mo agoYou'd think this should encourage people to build carbon-copies of the tools that have been bought out in the hope of being bought out... It's only a sustainable model if it's fringe enough and with low enough purchase amounts to not eventually become an exit strategy for people who might not even have tried otherwise.
- mittermayr 7mo agoAmazing 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?
- brbrodude 7mo agoI guess it's cause cursive is no longer a thing in the US..
- IAmBroom 7mo agoNor spelling and punctuation?
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoPlease try again? I fixed a couple of snags. Use your same template?
- psychoslave 7mo agoNot 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.
- world2vec 7mo agoTurning my handwriting into a font is akin to encrypt the text :-D
- ixvo 7mo ago[flagged]
- feverzsj 7mo agoThat'll be the ugliest font.
- ixvo 7mo agoThis works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.
- theultdev 7mo agoPeople write in cursive all the time. You mainly sign in cursive. Kids are being taught cursive again. Texas has been doing it again for awhile. No idea why they stopped teaching it for a few years, kind of messed those kids up. How do people have a signature if they don't know cursive? Do they just print it twice lol?
- inanutshellus 7mo agoI agree with your statement, and cursive has extra benefits like leading to better hand strength and so on but outside of that, signatures aren't a good counter argument. Signatures aren't cursive, they're a curated, custom art piece. Arguably even signatures are being replaced with digital agreements. Just click "I Agree [and we'll use other proof than the squiggly that it was you because your digital squiggly is uselessly different every time]".
- DonHopkins 7mo agoArguing that something is good because Texas is doing it is ultimately a self defeating argument that reveals a lot about you (as do the other internet incel horseshit and exuberant defenses of Scott Adams' racism and misogyny you post). Do you mean systematic institutionalized racism, rampant gun violence, and frequent school shootings are good too?
- theultdev 7mo agoIt's not good "because Texas is doing it". Never said that, learn to read. All schools were doing it until several years ago. But noone can even read now so moot point...
- himata4113 7mo agoText encryption, I like it!
- micw 7mo agoCan I turn a real font into my handwriting?
- catoc 7mo agoA wise doctor once typed…
- xmattx 7mo agoTried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.
- stratosgear 7mo agoSame here. The characters need to move higher. They look like I wrote them below the baseline... :(
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoTry again? Same template should work (with current fixes in place).
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoPlease, try again. I pushed a few fixes out this afternoon.
- easton 7mo agoChris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.
- coxley 7mo agoRight!? My mind teleported back to the TechTV era for a second.
- m-hodges 7mo agoLockerGnome!
- xanderlewis 7mo agoI saw pirillo.com and thought 'it's got to be him'.
- chandraonline 7mo agoOMG Yes! Dating ourselves aren't we? Pirillo, Laporte, Dvorak - awesome folks from Tech TV
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoi used to date myself but had to buy myself dinner
- goodmythical 7mo agoMobilePhone2003? or was it 2006?
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoi'm not quite dead
- alsodumb 7mo agoMy hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)
- r2ob 7mo agoMy hand writing is so bad(2)
- karmasimida 7mo agoWell I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it
- axegon_ 7mo agoAwesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin
- beardyw 7mo agoYes, I thought something which could make my handwriting more like a font would be useful.
- IAmBroom 7mo agoI have long theorized that it is inscrutable for a reason: as a bar to laypeople reading a/o editing prescriptions. Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name. (Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)
- cestith 7mo agoI know of someone who was let go from an employer when they contacted the doctor’s office whose stationary was used on the employee's many absence excuse notes. It turned out they were a gerontology office. The employee was in their early twenties. Controlling access to stationary, prescription pads, and the office’s fax machine is one part. Making it hard to forge the doctor’s handwriting is another.
- toast0 7mo agoMy 3rd grade teacher wrote something like this regarding my handwriting in my final report card: We've done all we can for toast0. But he'll have a secretary so it'll be fine I never did get to have a secretary, but thanks to COVID learning losses, I do manage to have a lot better penmanship than about half of kids going into high school this year. :)
- ynac 7mo agoWe had a science teacher in 7th grade whose teaching style was all overhead notes. She'd give us time to copy them into our spiral bounds or 3-rings and when we were all done, she'd swap for the next slide. She didn't lecture but she did tell stories about her farm, hunting, and occasionally some science. We could ask questions and tell stories if we finished copying the notes before everyone else was done. So, one of the takeaways from her class was getting very efficient and neat with my writing. I tried to write in a clean all caps and eventually learned which strokes were best for speed and spacing. I still use that hand-font and I always think of her sitting on the wall radiator laughing through some story of trying to fix a bad situation.
- scotty79 7mo agoA 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.
- amigocesar 7mo agoWhat about tildes, accents, cedilles? á é í ó ú?
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoauto generated. ;)
- SAI_Peregrinus 7mo agoI'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.
- elevation 7mo ago> I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them I took this approach once and enjoyed the result. I filled out 10 copies of the template of a handwriting font generator and generated all 10 fonts. Then I wrote a python script to process a libreoffice document. If it saw the 'handwriting1' style anywhere in the document it would pseudorandomly alternate between fonts. Since uncanny resemblance of two adjacent letter is the biggest giveaway that a handwriting font is at play, I made sure my script would change the font within a word if there were two adjacent 'T' or 'S' characters. I've since lost the code (it wasn't something I needed to often use) but with LLMs these days I'm sure I'd be inclined to build something better -- for instance, performing the randomization within a single font file, and using custom glyphs for adjacent 't' characters that might have a common crossbar, improved support for other languages I use, or rendering a particular case of my legal name as a signature.
- otikik 7mo agoNot great for doctors
- mattv8 7mo agoHad 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/ https://fontmeme.com/fonts/mattfont-font/
- mft_ 7mo agoA 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-javascript https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
- lastdong 7mo agoThis is really cool, educative and very well written.
- deposittag 7mo agoI 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo agoRun it through a dilate filter a few times.
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoTry it again. Fixed quite a few bugs today.
- andsoitis 7mo agoI write in cursive. Does this work for that?
- al_borland 7mo ago30 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.
- rustyhancock 7mo agoMy 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!
- varun_ch 7mo agoThe website does say that it was ‘vibe coded’[0] so perhaps the author didn’t test it very thoroughly? They apparently do ‘vibe coding’ courses so.. that’s something. [0] https://arcade.pirillo.com/ https://arcade.pirillo.com/
- rustyhancock 7mo agoIt's really impressive for what it is. I tried it various pens and paper sizes and printer scales. And it suddenly worked but only if scanned at low res (200DPI). Still I got a partially working font at the end
- varun_ch 7mo agoFor sure! I was so surprised to see that this was done all in browser. I mean there’s no reason that shouldn’t be possible in 2026 considering there’s services that do this server side, but still it’s always impressive when something like this comes along.
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoIt's not a course. What I do is free and intended to be workshops for non-technical users to understand the power of technology rather than slamming it in their face.
- simonebrunozzi 7mo agoTangentially 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.
- c22 7mo agoTeletype machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
- electroly 7mo agoThis is what a teletype is: it's a typewriter with a serial connection. You send bytes over the serial cable and it types them.
- airstrike 7mo agoOnly tangentially related, but this is a good research starting point: https://www.gt-pressura.com/ https://www.gt-pressura.com/
- 2ap 7mo agoYou want a daisy wheel printer[1] I think. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
- jagged-chisel 7mo agoAdd this to your list if things you try: https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/02/a-hyperrealistic-typewriter-font-for-the-2020s/ https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/02/a-hyperrealistic-typewrit... Article links right to the font.
- kmoser 7mo agoThis is cool, but when viewed up close, laser-printed letters still lack the fuzzy edges and imprinted texture of letters created by typewriter slugs.
- jdelman 7mo agoI 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.
- trentnelson 7mo agoWell now I’m curious how they did it in the 90s. Some poor schmo doing pixel by pixel font creation?
- necovek 7mo agoVector tracing was a thing way back, and from there, it was probably some simple programming to make a font out of a number of vector glyph images.
- TomMasz 7mo agoI 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.
- jedberg 7mo agoThe 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...
- catlover76 7mo ago[dead]
- mock-possum 7mo agoOdd 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?
- nzxt210 7mo agoMeo
- bovermyer 7mo agoPersonally, 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.
- DANmode 7mo agoComing Soon: Make multiple fonts of your handwriting samples, and have a robot interlace them pseudorandomly!
- noufalibrahim 7mo agoI agree. I make adjustments depending on which parts of the page I'm on and what I'm writing. This is a nice project but I'm not sure id want to use it for anything.
- jaxn 7mo agoI used something like this tool to create 10 different fonts of my handwriting. Then I wrote scripts to randomize which font was used for each character, ensuring that no word had that same variant of a single letter. It worked incredibly well for a personalized printed mail campaign. It really did look hand written. edit: basically what DANmode replied to the same parent. I did this 10 years ago while running for political office.
- jwbron 7mo ago[dead]
- fifferfaffer 7mo agoWorked good for me scanning with the Google drive app and "enhancing" the scan. Typing out my own handwriting is a really neat experience!
- sbcorvus 7mo agoThis is cool, but my handwriting is illegible so only a handful of people would be able to read it. Love the idea, though.
- mixylplik3 7mo agoI can't speak to the service in the headline, but I used a service at least 10 years ago and brought it to a family party to show off. I thought it was a cool thing to do so we all filled out the alphabet/number/symbol sheets I printed out and made a bunch of fonts for family members. Didn't think much of it, the novelty faded, but then people started getting old and dying. Now I have little snippets of history and unique handwriting, albeit simplistic and imperfect, that remind me of my loved ones passed in a unique way.
- navsatech 7mo agoThis look cool.
- sebastianconcpt 7mo agoOkay this is reaching me like 30 years later. My current one I don't like it as much as the one I used to have. That old one would turn into a font and feel cool.
- plsft 7mo agothis is actually quite good. wasn't expecting it to be that accurate.
- shevy-java 7mo agoBut then I can not read anything anymore. :(
- Wistar 7mo agoThis is cool. I'd like to see an example of a filled-out template that generated a decent font. I think that'd be helpful.
- fdb 7mo agoHey, cool, that's using my library: https://opentype.js.org/ https://opentype.js.org/ It's nice to see it pop up in so many places!
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoSo VERY grateful!
- codecarter 7mo agoAs a calligrapher, I appreciate this.
- ChrisPirillo 7mo ago\o/
- rkagerer 7mo agoI did this 20 years ago when I bought a convertible tablet with a stylus. It was the first touchscreen I'd ever owned, and ran a special Tablet edition of XP. If I recall, it came with something similar to Microsoft Font Maker. On a roadtrip, a friend of mine scrawled in all the letters and presto, we had a new handwritten font. The script looked kind of like a kid's handwriting. Over the years I used it (with permission) in various PDF's and doc files, mainly when I was showcasing how to fill in a form. It lent a nice, obvious distinction between the phrases that were part of the form template, and the portions that had been "handwritten" in. The last time I used it was to train volunteer firefighters how to fill in certain medical paperwork and equipment inspection logs.
- Storylinn 7mo ago[dead]
- burdin 7mo agofun tool! last month, i built a similar one but with focus on drawing directly on mobile. no need to print pages. open source! https://handofyou.app https://handofyou.app
- ChrisPirillo 7mo agoWow. :D Thanks for picking this up! More to come. I'm working on adding color support right now.