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FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

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Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#121

Post by kiyundai »

coderbants wrote: post #74
ghrl wrote: post #12

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…

If only my handwriting weren't utter chicken scratch I'd use this, but in my case - nobody needs to see that. :-/

No need for encryption if no-one can read you ;)

I'm in the same boat haha

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#123

Post by necovek »

trentnelson wrote: post #101
jdelman wrote: post #76

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.

Well now I’m curious how they did it in the 90s. Some poor schmo doing pixel by pixel font creation?

Vector tracing was a thing way back, and from there, it was probably some simple programming to make a font out of a number of vector glyph images.

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#124

Post by Fnoord »

gunalx wrote: post #109
Fnoord wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very good OCR models. Then it becomes a matter of which letter is which. In Latin script there's only 26 possibilities, and then there's numbers and symbols. 1) https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3

not as simple as just OCR and map though. Some letters want space above them some want to be placed lower. take g and f and c for examples g and f are about the same height but different ofsets, and c would look like a capital C if scaled to the same size as g and f. (we probably want to auto adjust scales to match more evenly unless the text is on a grid (in case removing the grid is the difficulty) These are just t…

Mistral OCR is OCR combined with LLM. In English, it as simple as 'just good OCR' though. Check the example on the webpage I linked. The screenshot doesn't show perfect handwriting. The (invisible) line also doesn't go straight.

FTA:

> Handwriting: Mistral OCR accurately interprets cursive, mixed-content annotations, and handwritten text layered over printed forms.

> Forms: Improved detection of boxes, labels, handwritten entries, and dense layouts. Works well on invoices, receipts, compliance forms, government documents, and such.

> Scanned & complex documents: Significantly more robust to compression artifacts, skew, distortion, low DPI, and background noise.

> Complex tables: Reconstructs table structures with headers, merged cells, multi-row blocks, and column hierarchies. Outputs HTML table tags with colspan/rowspan to fully preserve layout.

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#125

Post by necovek »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #72
psychoslave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

How fast can you write in cursive vs non-cursive? I am much slower in non-cursive when writing.

The only issue is that my cursive is pretty lousy looking.

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#126

Post by necovek »

jech wrote: post #42
tazjin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a good one, I must admit.

FWIW, Serbian Cyrillic cursive does not have that issue, or at least not as bad: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/%D...

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#129

Post by dpoloncsak »

necovek wrote: post #125
dpoloncsak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How fast can you write in cursive vs non-cursive? I am much slower in non-cursive when writing. The only issue is that my cursive is pretty lousy looking.

I'd hedge to say roughly the same, but that's writing print in chicken-scratch handwriting (which is my norm) and under-practiced with cursive. I'd suspect after using cursive a bit I would speed up. Similar to using home-row when typing vs pick-and-peck or whatever they call it

My phone would transcribe even quicker than that, though, which would probably be my go-to instead of hand-writing

Re: FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

#130

Post by bl4kers »

psychoslave wrote: post #18
Daneel_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The word "generation" commonly refers to year of birth and cultural context (e.g. geographical location). So yes, it is generational
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