4 ms·
It'd be nice if there was support for multiple versions of characters and ligature support. But still, pretty damn cool. Edit: Seems like they have a new versi
by Osmium 13y ago
It'd be nice if there was support for multiple versions of characters and ligature support. But still, pretty damn cool.
Edit: Seems like they have a new version of the tool on PaintFont.com which does have support for ligatures!
Edit2: Just tried it in my lunch break. Worked perfectly :) Doesn't look much like my real handwriting due to the uniform spacing, but definitely fun to use.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- maaaats 13y agoYeah, some naive space-optimization would make this so much better.
- biot 13y agoI've always wondered if that's possible: a font file where if you type the letter 'A' for example, one of five versions of the letter 'A' is chosen. And so on for other letters so that a bit of randomness is imparted to the "writing".
- nsfmc 13y agoIt is! Doing it right is the hard part since opentype is limited to very specific kinds of substitutions, so you don't get nondeterministic random, but you usually get something that appears random-enough. The canonical example of actually nondet-random is the font Beowulf[0], by letterror, i don't know that i can do it justice here, research it a bit to really get the story. Two contemporary examples: Bello Script[1] and Trixie HD, although lots of people are really pushing opentype's features these days in novel ways. [0]: http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/ http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/ [1]: http://www.underware.nl/fonts/bello/features/how_does_it_work/ http://www.underware.nl/fonts/bello/features/how_does_it_wor... [2]: http://trixiefont.com/story/index.html http://trixiefont.com/story/index.html
- davidw 13y ago> [0]: http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/ http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/ Oh, that's cool, that's the handiwork of Guido van Rossum's brother: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_van_Rossum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_van_Rossum
- specialist 13y agoThanks for the tips. Will definitely investigate. A buddy of mind wrote HandPlot for AutoCAD (way back in the day). It'd jitter the HPGL/2 output to mimic a drafter's pen drawn technique. The visual "draft" effect encouraged dialog, whereas the precision of normal plots shutdown discussion. (Looks like it's now a built in feature called Visual Styles, hmmm). I've always wanted to do the same for hand lettering. Any one who's done drafting on the boards knows what I'm talking about. People used to take great pride in their unique lettering. Somehow parlaying that into one's design/contract drawings would be awesome. I looked at PostScript and TrueType, but couldn't figure out how to randomize the letter forms. I never looked at OpenType.
- nsfmc 13y agosadly, this was only really possible in Type 3 fonts which were basically 100% postscript interpreted at the glyph level. this made it possible to do things like actually generate a new instance of a glyph each time it was printed at the expense of printing being incredibly costly. If you find interviews where people talk about using beowulf, they all remark how it basically put their printers' cpus to actual work and that files would take forever to output. opentype only allows for simple substitutions, but in many cases, those seem to do the trick if you programmatically generate a substitution map based on a target language's corpus. i think there's a robofont or typecon session where they talk about this and the practical limitations of how many gsubs most opentype engines can deal with before they stop altogether. very cool stuff and mega-niche, but it's cool to see how people play with constraints.
- jared314 13y ago> The visual "draft" effect encouraged dialog That sounds similar to the reasoning behind Balsamiq Mockups and other wire-framing/diagramming tools that look intentionally "crude".
- mistercow 13y agoYou can actually achieve pretty good results without even using different versions of letters. I did an experiment with this a few years ago when I was playing with an idea of a tool to produce artificial hand-lettering for comics. Here's the basic algorithm: 1. Generate two maps of low frequency noise. Perlin noise would probably work well, but just blurred noise will do. If we're thinking in terms of blurring, the radius should be on the order of x-height/2. Call that scale "S". One map is for X and one is for Y. 2. Convert the text to Bézier curves. 3. Process those curves, subdividing any long curve segments until they are no longer than S. 4. Now, process the curves again, and for each point, look up the corresponding point in your two maps. Displace the point's position according to the map value, with maximum distance somewhere on the order of S/4. 5. Render the new curves. The parameters would need to be tweaked (I'm reporting them from vague memory), but that basic outline can provide surprisingly convincing results when applied to a handwriting font. Note that I did not mention what order of Bézier curve to use. You can get good results even by converting to polygons, but the segment length will need to be shorter.