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Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

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Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#21

Post by kragen »

hsfzxjy wrote: post #7
kragen wrote: post #2

this is amazing! i'm guessing you can probably get it to antialias without much more work as the demo video shows, it's probably not something you want to have in between you and the ability to scroll a web page or close a tab. but i guess using harfbuzz now means we're buying into a turing-complete virtual machine running an arbitrary program in order to display a glyph. how seriously crippled are the harfbuzzless r…

This is just a project for fun, like llama.ttf. WASM shaper is still experimental and not yet shipped in and products, not before more limitation carried out as I think. So I'm not too worried about it.

it's super cool!

Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#22

Post by okcdz »

hsfzxjy wrote: post #9
a1o wrote: post #5

I don't get it, why there's no link to a GitHub pages website to test the thing?

You can't test it in a browser, since no browser at present is linked against libharfbuzz with WASM shaper. Instead, one can test it with a modified local program such as gedit in the demo. As convenience, I built a Docker image that packs both the ttf file and the modified gedit together. You can try it out via `make run` as stated in the instructions.

If you just want to run locally. Why not using the native libharfbuzz directly? What's the purpose of WASM here?

Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#23

Post by PhilipRoman »

I bet this is what people felt when JavaScript was first demoed on the web.

In the year 2077, when each font will run it's own virtual machine on WASM containing a "minimal" Ubuntu image, some enlightened blogger will suggest server side rendered fonts as a performance improvement.

Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#25

Post by bawolff »

okcdz wrote: post #22
hsfzxjy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't test it in a browser, since no browser at present is linked against libharfbuzz with WASM shaper. Instead, one can test it with a modified local program such as gedit in the demo. As convenience, I built a Docker image that packs both the ttf file and the modified gedit together. You can try it out via `make run` as stated in the instructions.

If you just want to run locally. Why not using the native libharfbuzz directly? What's the purpose of WASM here?

WASM is to libharfbuzz (when experimental compile time option is enabled) what javascript is to HTML.

So this is essentially native (albeit experimental) libharfbuzz. WASM is used because its how font files are scripted (when using this experimental version of lubharfbuzz)

Its important to keep in mind that wasm is a general technology and is not just used by web browsers.

Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#28

Post by [deleted] »

hsfzxjy wrote: post #9
a1o wrote: post #5

I don't get it, why there's no link to a GitHub pages website to test the thing?

You can't test it in a browser, since no browser at present is linked against libharfbuzz with WASM shaper. Instead, one can test it with a modified local program such as gedit in the demo. As convenience, I built a Docker image that packs both the ttf file and the modified gedit together. You can try it out via `make run` as stated in the instructions.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

#30

Post by pjmlp »

Nice demo.

Without trying to steal the thread, what I would care is actually the opposite direction.

Neither in Swift Playgrounds, nor in any other programming development environment apps for both mobile OSes, have I found a good development experience using pen instead of keyboard.

Given how many of us "program" in paper notebooks, it is quite incredible that besides a couple of research projects done by PhD students, no one cares to actually make it more widespread in a usable way.

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