Reminds me of Averia, a font made by averaging fonts.
http://iotic.com/averia/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877025
This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#12With my own handwriting, once described in school as "bovine diarrhea committed to paper" (a rough translation) I have come to admire people's handwriting in a sort of wistful way. I think a discussion around this post would be incomplete without reference to the font made from Dijkstra's beautiful and clear hand writing. http://lucacardelli.name/indexartifacts.html (search for Dijkstra) or if you prefer a pdf previe…
I wonder how many misunderstandings and frustrations occurred because of that "z" which looks like a "2". Any of my math professors would have marked anything with that 2 wrong.
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#13Does anyone know what kind of algorithm they'd be using to "average" all of the letters? If you look at the I's and J's, you can see that though some people use horizontal crosses, they aren't included in the universal letter. Anyone have any insight here?
I'd similarly be curious about letters that have multiple ways of forming them: for example, capital G's and the "serif"
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#14Weirdly, it's only capitals, no numbers or punctuation. Not sure what I would do with such a typeface! Also it's more like an average of the world's finger-painting styles, since you have to draw the letters super big and on a touchscreen. Still, everyone does have their own style, and there are some interesting stats on the "left" of that nearly un-navigable website, letter averages by country or profession and such…
Yeah, I tried it out, and while it's a fun little thing, drawing with one's finger is very different than drawing with a pen (even a bic! :), and the results are inherently sort of clumsy. Something based on real handwriting (as is often done for individuals) would be vastly more interesting.
Also of course, the idea that this is anywhere near "universal" is pretty silly...
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#15Does anyone know what kind of algorithm they'd be using to "average" all of the letters? If you look at the I's and J's, you can see that though some people use horizontal crosses, they aren't included in the universal letter. Anyone have any insight here?
I haven't seen anything specific about how they are doing it, but I can give you a few guesses as to what common approaches would be.
The most straightforward way to model the shapes themselves is to put some points on each letter in corresponding locations on each letter. Every sample of each letter would need the same number of points, and each point would need to be in roughly the same spatial location on the letter (so, for a letter S, the first point in every sample would be at one end, the last at the other, and the ones between at some kind of identifying landmarks).
Given these collections of sampled curves, the simplest thing to do is to just compute the Euclidean mean, treating each of them as a point in a high-dimensional space. You could go farther and do PCA, giving you not only a mean but modes of variation. Using this you could examine the most common ways in which each letter varies in the population, which can be an interesting thing to study.
What I've described is building a statistical shape model from a boundary point distribution model (PDM) of an object. This is typically done in the context where you want to fit your model to new instances of the object, not just for finding a mean, and are known as Active Shape Models. You can check it out on wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shape_model). Here is one (among many possible choices) describing generally how this is done:
There are other techniques for representing the shapes or computing statistics that can produce better models, both from theoretical and practical points of view, but this is generally the most common and would be my first choice if I was going to do something like this. Of course, they could be doing something much simpler like a simple averaging of the images (assuming the letters are all in roughly the same place) as well.
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#16Wouldn't most people using the Latin alphabet be using cursive?
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#17Weirdly, it's only capitals, no numbers or punctuation. Not sure what I would do with such a typeface! Also it's more like an average of the world's finger-painting styles, since you have to draw the letters super big and on a touchscreen. Still, everyone does have their own style, and there are some interesting stats on the "left" of that nearly un-navigable website, letter averages by country or profession and such…
> Not sure what I would do with such a typeface!
WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHO DOESN'T LOVE ALLCAPS? I DON'T NEED NUMBERS, EITHER. X EQUALS FIVE MILLION ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED NINETY NINE POINT ONE FIVE FIVE SIX THREE. SEE?
IT'S LIKE I'M WRITING IN COBOL. THIS IS FUN.
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#18Wouldn't most people using the Latin alphabet be using cursive?
In the US (no clue about the rest of the world) cursive has gone out of style. Some schools don't even teach it anymore.
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#19Reminds me of Averia, a font made by averaging fonts. http://iotic.com/averia/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877025
That's actually a surprisingly-good-looking font.
Re: This Typeface’s Letters Are the Average of the World’s Handwriting
#20Weirdly, it's only capitals, no numbers or punctuation. Not sure what I would do with such a typeface! Also it's more like an average of the world's finger-painting styles, since you have to draw the letters super big and on a touchscreen. Still, everyone does have their own style, and there are some interesting stats on the "left" of that nearly un-navigable website, letter averages by country or profession and such…
> Not sure what I would do with such a typeface! WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHO DOESN'T LOVE ALLCAPS? I DON'T NEED NUMBERS, EITHER. X EQUALS FIVE MILLION ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED NINETY NINE POINT ONE FIVE FIVE SIX THREE. SEE? IT'S LIKE I'M WRITING IN COBOL. THIS IS FUN.
Where did you get those question marks and periods from?