There 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.
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.
Seems 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.
You'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.
I 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.
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 left 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.
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 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.
I 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.)
30 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.
Had 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/
That's not generational. Living in France I can ensure you that in primary school, kids still learn and use cursive as main writing system. I wasn't even aware anyone would use anything else to write by hand in Latin script.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
In the US, when I was in grade school we learned both, but almost all the kids chose to write in Latin script when given the option. I think we learned that first and it just stuck.
One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.
My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.
I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.
It 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.
OP 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.
Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.
My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
I'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.
> 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.
I'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.
The 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?
Not 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.
Amazing 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?
There 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.
If only my handwriting weren't utter chicken scratch I'd use this, but in my case - nobody needs to see that. :-/
Ah, 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.
Seems 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.
Interestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak to how well the open source version works.
[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf
IIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.
You'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.
I 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.
My 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 left 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.
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!
I 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.
A 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-jav...
This is really cool, educative and very well written.
Awesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin
Yes, I thought something which could make my handwriting more like a font would be useful.
I 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.)
Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.
Same here. The characters need to move higher. They look like I wrote them below the baseline... :(
Turning my handwriting into a font is akin to encrypt the text :-D
30 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.
Had 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/
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.
I think that might be generational. I don’t know anyone under 40 who writes in cursive. I certainly don’t.
That's not generational. Living in France I can ensure you that in primary school, kids still learn and use cursive as main writing system. I wasn't even aware anyone would use anything else to write by hand in Latin script.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
In the US, when I was in grade school we learned both, but almost all the kids chose to write in Latin script when given the option. I think we learned that first and it just stuck.
One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.
My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.
I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian (cursive and print examples are here)
Went through school in the early 2000s in US. We were taught cursive (script), but I don't think I've used it since school.
Seems odd, in hindsight, to teach hand-written prose uses a different set of symbols than when its typed out
As for Germany, as far as I know only few states still teach cursive: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift
The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift
Yeah, no idea how print became handwriting and handwriting longhand/cursive, but that's how it is and has been for decades in the USA.
It 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.
> 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%D...
Understandable.
OP 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.
Still taught in uk primary schools as the fastest way to get words down in paper
Makes me wonder whether there are diction tests (I feared/hated those with a passion) in the USA?
Never even heard that term before. So: no.
Too late to edit, 'dictation' was meant. Seems I still suck at spelling ;-/
Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.
i'm in the UK and most people i know drop cursive for non-joined up handwriting as soon as they get the opportunity.
It's more cultural than generational.
It's both. In the US, schools are turning away from teaching cursive, which clearly makes a generational cut.
My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
I'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.
> 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.
Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.
Right!? My mind teleported back to the TechTV era for a second.
LockerGnome!
I'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.
Well I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it
The 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?
Not 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.
I write in cursive. Does this work for that?
My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)
My hand writing is so bad(2)
Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?
Ironically, that's exactly what calligraphy is.
And learning to write in 'fonts' (hands) like block-print is still a form of calligraphy.
Asking the right questions
Not great for doctors
Text encryption, I like it!
A 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.
Amazing 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?
I guess it's cause cursive is no longer a thing in the US..
Nor spelling and punctuation?
That'll be the ugliest font.
A wise doctor once typed…
This works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.
People 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?
What about tildes, accents, cedilles?
á é í ó ú?
Only applicable for retarded countries where people don't write in cursive
new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !
I hereby declare I''ll be unfit for school next Friday due to an illness.
Signed, Mom
I HEREBY DECLARE I' LL BE UNFIT FOR SCHOOL NE XT FRIDAY DUE TO AN ILLnESS .
S I G N E D , M O M
The idea is cool, but, well:
"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."
Your post makes it sound like you consider this a bad thing?
I don’t see the downside here.
If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?
Are you implying that the lack of data harvesting is a disadvantage?
It not a disadvantage but a rare trait nowadays.
sound great
well 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