Turn your handwriting into a font

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 7:18 PM UTC

sshanky wrote: post #60

WalterBright wrote: post #20

One of the charms of a printed book is the imperfection of the fonts and the impressions of the fonts. Each 'a' impression is slightly different - maybe a little higher, a little lower, a little blotchier, etc. But if I read an ebook, the letters are always identical. I've often thought that if I wrote an ebook reader, I'd use a font that mimics the imperfections in printed works. I'd have maybe 20-30 different 'a' i…

I wonder if there would be value in simulating left and right hand pages on a single page view screen. I'm imagining something where you'd see the left page, and the crease between the pages rendered on the right edge of the screen, with a slice of the left edge of the text from the facing page visible. Turning the page would be rendered as a slide over to the right. The next page turn would show the page flipping to…

One reason I prefer an ereader over a book is I can read it with one hand. (It's possible with a book, but a bit awkward.)

Post by jongalloway2 » Tue, Jun 14, 2016, 7:15 PM UTC

bazzargh wrote: post #55

disordinary wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just modify the glyphs programmatically on draw so every character is unique? I thought of writing a word processor where each glyph created a bump map so as you type the characters are slightly indented as if stroked by a type writer.

Back in the 90s, this was done using Type 3 fonts (which have full access to the postscript language). This 1995 paper, for example, describes a technique for generative, random handwriting from samples. http://luc.devroye.org/mcdougallpaper.pdf

Here's a very recent technique that renders an input string based on analysis of handwriting samples: http://visual.cs.ucl.ac.uk/pubs/handwriting/

Re: Turn your handwriting into a font

Re: Turn your handwriting into a font