Live data from Hacker News

Making a font of my handwriting

chameth.com

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#31
post #5

I did something similar for my wedding website back in 2013. We used a mail-in service that produced a decent TTF, and then I converted it to a WOFF. Still online at https://ruthandjosh.net/story/ (warning, millennial cringe ahead)

Well that was delightful.

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#33
I always thought this was such a cool idea to preserve the handwriting style of someone you love (I adore my partner's handwriting), but the conversion to a font never seems to keep the spacing right, as you show in the final comparison.

I've been thinking of tinkering with an image to image generation model to convert text output from the font into something that looks closer to the handwritten version. Seems like it should be possible, but you need a lot of data.

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#34
Honestly, this idea is intriguing enought that I might actually pay for a month of that service. I'm willing to make that my first software purchase because I want to support symbiotic business practices like the one described (as opposed to adversarial rent-seeking ones seen all too often these days).

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#35
post #5

I did something similar for my wedding website back in 2013. We used a mail-in service that produced a decent TTF, and then I converted it to a WOFF. Still online at https://ruthandjosh.net/story/ (warning, millennial cringe ahead)

Hell yeah, keep that site up. What a marvel in this age of link rot.

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#36

They say that you remember more when handwriting than when typing. I believe that. One thing I have wondered about is what if you write on a tablet and then it digitizes your handwriting. Do you still get the same benefit, from the process of having handwritten it? I would think that part of the value would be in seeing the information written in your own handwriting, which makes me suspect that having a font like th…

This is not a humble brag by any means, just sharing my experience

I type 121 wpm and I simply can’t concentrate when writing by hand

It’s too slow and instead of focusing on formulating my thoughts or capturing what’s being said I get super fidgety

Not to mention my handwriting stinks

For me it’s a lot easier to remember when I’m fully immersed and processing ideas vs tediously writing

I do think this is probably just lack of handwriting skill - I definitely learned all this in school and took handwritten notes most of my life, but I suspect I never did it right back then

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#38
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the world of web, cursive is a typographic term referring to fonts that aren't sans or sans serif and are typically used for decorative purposes.

I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography. Cursive there afaik mostly means that it has a ton of ligatures (i.e. a ton of "sorts.") Fonts that are decorative, when I worked in prepress, were simply called "decorative." It just meant "not for body text" i.e. hard or annoying to read. I assume in the past it meant "don't buy a ton of these, and none in small sizes" because you weren't ever going to be…

> I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography.

You're correct, "cursive" is a handwriting term, not a typographic one. The parent commenter almost certainly meant "script". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_typeface

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#39
I did this for my old blog back in the 2000s - I used an online service that produced a pretty bad font that I could clean up using FontForge into something reasonable. It was a fun novelty but my penmanship is pretty bad and once in a while I would get flamed in the comments in my own handwriting.

Re: Making a font of my handwriting

#40
There was retail boxed software that would do this on Windows 95 that included worksheets and software. You'd write examples in each square of the worksheet that you would then scan in and convert to TTF with their proprietary software.

I would say it seems like a simple enough task for a weekend project but I know better.

Post reply on HN