[HN Gopher] I made a font based on my handwriting
___________________________________________________________________
I made a font based on my handwriting
Author : app4soft
Score : 162 points
Date : 2020-06-06 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sachachua.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sachachua.com)
| [deleted]
| watersb wrote:
| This was a cool thing to try when PostScript became more common,
| the release of the Apple LaserWriter printer [0]. I made a Type 1
| font kind of like my handwriting. It's tedious but not super
| complicated. The real challenge is making something that doesn't
| look awful - hinting and ligatures and stuff. I might try it
| again.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is tied to the absolute path of files in your home directory
| making it difficult to rebuild with say differing kerning values.
| It would be nice if it referred to relative paths. At least one
| path seems to be /home/sacha.local/lib when I assume it ought to
| be referring to /home/sacha/.local/lib
|
| It would be neat if it referred to relative paths within the repo
| even nicer if it if evaluating it installed needed python
| libraries locally so you could clone it. Open it in emacs.
| Modify. Eval buffer.
|
| Regarding kerning the only thing I think is really off is r
| followed by e example Here its not as noticeable with a smallish
| font but becomes more noticeable in a larger headline or title.
| I'm using it as the font for org headlines.
| paulnechifor wrote:
| I've always wanted to do this, but it only really works if you
| have a typeset handwriting style. Regular handwriting has too
| many "ligatures".
|
| For example consider just "vo" vs "io". The end of "v" ends
| horizontally near the top. "i" end at the bottom. So the line
| that starts "o" has to begin at different positions.
|
| Most fonts solve this by starting a discontinuous "o" always at
| the bottom. But this looks ugly.
|
| And that's jut two letter combinations...
| amai wrote:
| I want to see a math font for LaTeX based on handwriting.
| yeswecatan wrote:
| My wedding anniversary is coming up and I want to frame our
| wedding vows as a surprise. I'd really like to use our
| handwritten vows, but mine are in a notebook across several
| pages. I was wondering if there was a way to scan everything,
| extract the text, and put it all on one page. Here's to hoping
| this guide will help.
| loeg wrote:
| You could just write it out again by hand.
| Roritharr wrote:
| If it weren't HN i'd consider this snark, but here it's
| entirely possible this wasn't considered as the first option.
| yeswecatan wrote:
| Ha, it wasn't. It brings up an interesting point, though.
| Even though I'd scan and manipulate the original vows, I
| still feel that's a bit more special than simply re-writing
| them.
| aasasd wrote:
| Sounds doable, suspiciously so. When I get rich and have a lot of
| time, I'll go through it just to figure out why 'handwritten'
| fonts don't ever include a dozen alternate sets of the same
| characters so the shapes actually vary--like when written by
| hand. Instead, I type out something like 'na na na na na na na na
| na na na na na na na na Batman' and observe the same 'n' and the
| same 'a' over and over.
| sintum wrote:
| You should have a look at Signato[1] font. It looks quite real.
| However, it is not open source.
|
| [1] http://signato.lt/en/
| grimgrin wrote:
| To be consistent with me I'd need both of the common a's,
| whatever they're individually called
|
| I think it's because I like the curly-top "a" but habitually do
| the cursive-friendly "a"
|
| edit: speaking of cursive friendly a's I was doing a thing when
| carrying a paper note book for a few months, not too long ago,
| where'd I'd ask a friend or relative or maybe a stranger to
| write a-z in lowercase cursive. I probably collected 50+ of
| these
|
| It collected both skilled and struggling to recall
| contributions. Certainly the oldest had the sleekest cursive
|
| Little other things popped up, like the correct "b" and an
| incorrect "b" was fairly common to see
| gregmac wrote:
| Thus got me curious, and I just spent a few minutes learning
| about OTF ligatures and alternatives, and apparently random is
| possible: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/12818
|
| From what I've read, the technology exists to build a font that
| would be a pretty convincing handwriting alternative. It would
| take a lot of effort, as it would n involve several glyph
| alternatives for each character, several variations of dozens
| of ligatures (joined glyphs) and randomness for selection. You
| could even do variants like slightly different
| spacing/sizing/positioning (no one writes perfectly straight).
|
| Probably part of the issue is use case. Personal handwriting is
| kind of neat for a headline or call-out on a blog or something,
| but I wouldn't necessarily want to read a whole long post that
| way. I'm not really sure where else it would be useful -
| students trying to cheat on a "handwriting required"
| assignment, if that's even still a thing?
| jhpriestley wrote:
| If the goal is to produce a simulation of handwriting then a
| font (which is a simulation of a case of metal blocks) seems
| like a bad starting point. Better to simulate a pen moving
| along a curve and then vary curve parameters (acceleration
| etc).
| n3k5 wrote:
| > _a font (which is a simulation of a case of metal
| blocks)_
|
| In metal typesetting, a font is exactly a collection of
| metal blocks (which embody glyphs of a given design, size,
| and thickness). But on a computer, a font is a piece of
| software that renders text in a given typeface --
| simulating a pen moving along curves with varying
| parameters is entirely feasible. Not at all a bad starting
| point.
| aasasd wrote:
| That feature is what I was talking about. However, alternates
| seem to be more-or-less commonplace for usual ligatures or,
| lately, for gimmicks like symbols in 'programming fonts'--but
| pretty rarely employed for variety and randomness. Whenever I
| see a 'handwritten' font, I spot identical characters even in
| short runs of text.
|
| As far as I (vaguely) know, alternates aren't intended to
| produce true randomness. So instead I would throw in sheer
| quantity of alternate glyphs, to put identical ones further
| apart and shuffle other ones more.
|
| With the method from the posted article, producing the
| characters doesn't seem to take much effort. And the
| characters there aren't joined, so no need for traditional
| ligatures. Lastly, with a large number of alternates, kerning
| would add a lot of work--but then again, you don't really
| kern when writing with a pen, do you?
| n3k5 wrote:
| > random is possible
|
| Thank you! This answers one of my questions. But what about
| procedural generation -- a new glyph every time, e.g. an
| interpolation of multiple prototypical shapes as described in
| that SE answer ... something something eigenspace?
|
| I know PostScript is Turing complete and thus assume a PS
| font can pull this off; does this extend to OpenType?
| Apparently yes: OpenType is pretty much a superset of PS (and
| TrueType, of course). Just searched the web for "opentype
| turing complete" and the second result led right back to
| HN[0]:
|
| > _OpenType is technically Turing Complete, however the usual
| way is to just cycle through letter form variations._ --
| danielvf
|
| So this answers my other question? Hold up, check this out:
| Another answer from that SE post you linked mentions the
| Beowolf [sic] font[1].
|
| > _FF Beowolf came about at the end of the dark and murky
| 1980s when Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland found a way
| to hack PostScript fonts. When printed, each point in each
| letter on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a
| shaken, distraught appearance._
|
| > [...]
|
| > _while it worked fine (if a tad slow) through most of the
| 1990s, FF Beowolf was eventually barred from performing its
| PostScript magic: pesky things like printer drivers and
| operating systems learned to ignore the aberrations. FF
| Beowolf seemed destined to end up a mere memory. OpenType
| technology brought new hope, cutting new pathways in the
| type-tech continuum, which would eventually lead to a new
| generation of random fonts. Purists and typographic
| philosophers will be quick to point out that these OT fonts
| do not actually alter their shape in the printer as their
| forebearers did. Instead they make use of a kind of pre-
| programmed randomness: each glyph in each font (except R20)
| has ten alternate forms and a massive Faustian brain to
| control the mayhem._
|
| What a rabbit hole! In this case, it seems we're back to
| "several variations", but I still don't know whether full-on
| procedural generation is generally workable with OpenType.
| Does more modern technology's "ignorance" of "the
| aberrations" have to do with caching of glyph shapes? Is the
| Turing completeness curtailed to protect against DoS,
| decompression/logic bombs?
|
| By the way, the type specimen on the FF Beowolf page I linked
| features an amusingly a propos quote:
|
| > _Im Rausch schreiben, nuchtern gegenlesen._
|
| Write intoxicated, proofread sober.
|
| > It would take a lot of effort, as it would n involve
| several glyph alternatives for each character, several
| variations of dozens of ligatures (joined glyphs) and
| randomness for selection.
|
| Agreed, it's a silly amount of work -- if you did it the
| brute force way. Which is exactly why I'm interested in smart
| procedural generation. You mentioned that such a style
| wouldn't be appropriate for running text, so infinite
| variability isn't important (and use cases where it would be
| important can be rather questionable).
|
| However, even a curt headline often contains multiple Es or
| Ts or other Aoin Shrdlus[2]. And because the more appropriate
| use cases tend to involve above-average font sizes, word
| wrapping can conspire to place identical glyphs in close
| proximity. I think one wouldn't have to be a huge typography
| nerd to find one's suspension of disbelief in the pretense of
| hand lettering kind of shattered in the countenance of such a
| similitude. Not to mention homogeneous digraphs.
|
| Having just a few alternate forms of each character totally
| solves that; no need for ligatures. But a font that gets by
| on just one prototype for each glyph would be even more
| efficient (less labour intensive).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16376485
|
| [1] https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etaoin_shrdlu
| toast0 wrote:
| Personal handwriting is used a lot in sales mailers. Except
| that it's totally fake, it looks like someone spent time on
| it. Same thing when they send you a letter with a post it on
| it. Looks real-ish.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The post right above this one on hacker news at this time
| (16:20:16 UTC) is titled "What did you do"?
|
| (i.e. the title of the post above this post is a question
| answered by the title of this post).
| mono-bob wrote:
| If I look at the resulting font in Safari on my iPhone it shows
| up as double lines. Until I zoom in, then it suddenly looks fine.
| Does anyone have an idea what is the cause of this?
| srean wrote:
| I would love to have a font made out of Dijkstra's handwriting,
| if for nothing else but for the legacy -- of the man and his
| EWDs.
|
| He used to have pencil hanging on a string in his office. It was
| labeled "word processor".
|
| Ironically enough, _Dijkstra 's algorithm_ is perhaps least of
| his accomplishments.
|
| EDIT: thanks FrenchyJiby, mkl. Wasn't aware
| mkl wrote:
| There is one, downloadable all over the place, but I can't find
| the origin. Try searching for [dijkstra font].
| FrenchyJiby wrote:
| Do you know of previous attempts to do so[1]? There's a
| TrueType font as per your wishes[2]!
|
| [1]: http://lucacardelli.name/indexArtifacts.html [2]:
| http://lucacardelli.name/Artifacts/Fonts/Pc/dijkstra.ttf
| tombert wrote:
| Heh, if I were to make a font based on my handwriting, it would
| almost work as some level of encryption on my blog; there's
| certainly no way anyone would be able to read it.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Until someone edits the CSS. :)
| hateful wrote:
| When I was in elementary school (in the 80s) I used to fail
| handwriting over and over. My teacher told me "When you get
| older, if you want to work in an office, you're going to have
| to have to write a lot of reports, and for that you'll need
| good handwriting." to which I replied "No, I'm going to work on
| computers."
|
| If I made a font based on my handwriting, it could be
| considered a type of one-way encryption.
| seshagiric wrote:
| One way encryption made me crackup. Also remembered something
| funny from college.
|
| One of our mates had such a poor handwriting that we used to
| joke our grades were getting hit because teachers were
| exhausted after reading his answers. Same guy used to get
| frequent letters from his parents saying they could not
| understand what he wrote in the previous letter :)
| alias_neo wrote:
| I had a similar thing from my teachers in school, my hand
| writing is illegible.
|
| In the past decade or two, I've used a pen for precisely 3
| types of thing; greeting cards, signing documents and pub
| quizzes.
| anotherevan wrote:
| I learned to touch type in 1986 on a manual typewriter in
| secondary school. I knew I was going to work with computers
| and figured touch typing would be a worthwhile skill. I was
| the only male in the class and copped shit from my peers for
| taking the subject as everyone else perceived it as a class
| for women looking to go into secretarial work. To this day I
| still think it is the best thing I learned at school.
| winrid wrote:
| I actually made an effort to fix my handwriting. It worked, for
| like two weeks...
| aasasd wrote:
| Until you meet a pro: https://i.imgur.com/odBU94z.jpg?1
| pacaro wrote:
| This is the original inspiration for Philly handstyle
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That reminds me of certain kinds of medieval script. I had a
| professor in college whose dissertation made use of 12th
| century medical texts as primary sources. She told us about
| some of the frustrations with reading it.
|
| Calligraphic letterforms of the time use this basic form
| called a "minnum" (possibly not the correct spelling),
| possibly so called because the word "minimum" can be written
| in lowercase using them exclusively. I think you know where I
| might be going here.
|
| At one point, she went to her advisor for help, and he says
| in his broad, Scottish accent "Diane, count yer minna!" We
| all got a kick out of it.
|
| Edit: minimum -> minnum
| aasasd wrote:
| From what I heard, 'minimum' was a particular flex of olde
| calligraphers--not for readability but for putting down the
| palisade of strokes properly: https://calligraphypen.files.
| wordpress.com/2009/04/minimum.j...
| sn41 wrote:
| Sacha Chua's emacs videos on YouTube are a treat. Highly
| recommended for the great interviews, of one emacs enthusiast
| talking to other emacs enthusiasts.
| aquabeagle wrote:
| There was a free website many years ago that I used, where you
| print out a form with blocks on it and write each letter, then
| scan it and upload it and it gets turned into a font. I can't
| seem to find it now (or maybe it went paid).
|
| Microsoft has an app that lets you do this with a Windows tablet:
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-font-maker/9n920...
| elcomet wrote:
| Are there any fonts that have random variations for every letter
| (is it something possible to do with curent font systems?)
|
| That would be nice to create fonts that look more like real
| handwriting.
| pmichaud wrote:
| It is possible, and frequently done in higher quality
| handwriting style typefaces.
| billylo wrote:
| Well done, Sacha!
| renke1 wrote:
| That's awesome. I think it really adds a nice personal touch to
| own's blog. If only my handwriting wasn't that bad and I had a
| blog...
| app4soft wrote:
| > _and I had a blog..._
|
| Why not start one just right now?[0]
|
| [0] https://sachachua.com/blog/no-excuses-blogging
| [deleted]
| yesenadam wrote:
| Warning: You will have to give your email (and possibly $) to
| read the linked ebook.
|
| There seems something more than a little sordid about linking
| to one's own stuff on HN in that way.
| spudlyo wrote:
| There is no indication that app4soft is Sacha Chua. who is
| considered by many to be a pillar of the Emacs community. I
| would not hesitate to trust her with my email address.
| jvns wrote:
| If you have an iPad and apple pencil, there's a really great app
| to do this called iFontMaker: https://2ttf.com/.
|
| I used it to create a font from my handwriting that I've used
| extensively, and creating the font took maybe 15 minutes.
| pronoiac wrote:
| I've used that combination, and it was pretty great! Much
| quicker than my previous font-making efforts in FontForge,
| though also more organic.
| lowdose wrote:
| Imagine a world where it takes 15 minutes more to put it up on
| Google fonts.
| parhamn wrote:
| I'm seeing a world where Google Fonts has a ton of crappy
| fonts.
| fish45 wrote:
| I did this sophomore year because my French teacher wanted things
| handwritten. I spent a lot of time making it fit on the lined
| paper and getting the color just right but I'm sure she figured
| it out anyway.
| kleiba wrote:
| An interesting part is that the author was going for a literate
| programming [1] approach using Emacs org-mode [2]. The resulting
| file is here:
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sachac/sachac-hand/master/...
|
| The point (and the difference to just thoroughly commenting your
| code) is that you have one source file that equally serves as the
| basis for generating the actual program as well as its
| documentation. The link above shows the raw file, github renders
| it nicely if you go to the main page of the repository.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
|
| [2] https://orgmode.org/
| bloopernova wrote:
| In my devops work, I've been using literate programming as part
| of my personal documentation. Org-mode gets a lot of hype here
| on HN, but I really get a lot of value out of Org, Org-Roam,
| and Org-Babel (org-babel is the bit that underpins the literate
| programming part of org)
|
| Being able to see the code that generates certain tables in my
| older documentation really helps me to more quickly remember
| and use stuff I did months or years ago.
|
| Example: The command to get a list of S3 buckets that have a
| particular attribute set. The command to do that might not make
| much sense by itself (say in a history grep) but with extra
| text describing what and why, I understand it faster.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I also use org-babel to do the same thing at work, most
| recently with convoluted AWS CLI commands with lots of
| JMESPath query syntax that I can never remember. I use it for
| personal documentation, but it can also can make for very
| nice looking documents that you can later share with your
| team during Sprint retrospectives, or perhaps convert to a
| Confluence page.
| renke1 wrote:
| I'v always liked the idea of literate programming, but I was
| always wondering how it actually feels in practice. Do they
| usual editor/IDE features still work like in a non-literate
| environment? - I assume it might work in Emacs, but are there
| other editors that support this approach?
|
| Thinking about it, is Jupyter Notebooks (and the like) a form
| of literate programming?
|
| Thinking even more about it, I think I actually used (or tried
| to) literate programming in a course about Machine Learning
| using R and - if I remember correctly - LaTeX to generate the
| actual application and a PDF.
| d0mine wrote:
| You could use https://github.com/dzop/emacs-jupyter to
| combine Org mode + Jupyter.
|
| Here's an example emacs configuration: (use-
| package jupyter :after org :config
| (org-babel-do-load-languages 'org-babel-load-languages
| '((jupyter . t))) ;; default args for jupyter-python
| (setq org-babel-default-header-args:jupyter-python
| '((:results . "replace") (:async . "yes")
| (:session . "py") (:kernel . "python3"))))
|
| After that, you could execute jupyter code block (Org Babel):
| #+begin_src jupyter-python 1+1 #+end_src
| #+RESULTS: : 2
|
| You can use latex in org-mode, generate pictures, get nice
| git diff, export it to pdf, etc.
| jcheng wrote:
| It's extremely widely used in the R world. The RStudio IDE
| has extensive tooling for the R Markdown format.
| https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/
|
| We don't use the term "literate programming" much anymore,
| the concept of "reproducible reports" resonates much more
| with R users. But the experience is much the same.
|
| (Disclosure: employed at RStudio)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| They can in theory but making it work in practice seems a
| little harder. For example I tried this
|
| https://github.com/jingtaozf/literate-clojure
|
| but ran into this
|
| https://github.com/polymode/poly-org/issues/20
|
| Either some IDE like functionality doesn't work or syntax
| highlighting doesn't work after you go through additional
| complexity compared to simply starting a project.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I'v always liked the idea of literate programming, but I
| was always wondering how it actually feels in practice. Do
| they usual editor/IDE features still work like in a non-
| literate environment? - I assume it might work in Emacs, but
| are there other editors that support this approach?
|
| In Org Mode, you get all the syntax highlightings and
| keybindings for whatever language's mode if you do literate
| programming with it.
|
| What you _won 't_ get are things like being able to integrate
| your compilation failures, etc. As an example, if you write
| something that fails to compile, Emacs will not quickly be
| able to take you to the line that caused the failure.
| Similarly, things like linting, etc typically break.
|
| Frustratingly, if you get an exception (e.g. "KeyError" in
| Python), it will _not_ show the result of any _print_
| statements, so debugging is a bit painful.
|
| I'm sure someone can solve these problems, but I don't know
| that anyone has.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| It was disappointing to me when I recently found out that I
| couldn't create Jupyter notebooks with vim. The on-disk
| format is JSON.
|
| It sounds silly, but when there's a lot of work do in terms
| of writing the literature part, and then adding the actual
| code part, I'm much happier with vim than I am with the
| browser based editor.
|
| (This is for producing literate programs for the purpose of
| teaching others, not for my own benefit.)
| akdor1154 wrote:
| You should look into Jupytext, it might be just what you're
| after.
| LeanderK wrote:
| In my view Jupiter notebooks can be, but must not be, a form
| of literate programming. Many tutorials take the form of a
| single juypter-notebook exaplaining concepts with code
| interleaved, which i would argue is a form of literate
| programming. But my data-exploration notebooks, mostly code
| and an abundance of plots with sparse comments interleaved,
| don't really resemble anything i would call literate
| programming.
| mkl wrote:
| Do you mean "need not be" rather than "must not be"? "Must
| not be" means they shouldn't ever be.
|
| Most of my Jupyter notebooks are just code, but I've got
| some with long Latex mathematical derivations of formulas
| that appear in the code. I would actually like to be able
| to have that kind of thing in comments within the code
| itself. I don't do literate programming really though.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Oh man. I remember back in the 1990's, there was a company that
| you could fill in a grid with all the letters in your handwriting
| (block letters only), mail it to them, and for something like $50
| they'd mail you back a floppy disk with a TrueType font of your
| handwriting a few weeks later.
|
| These days, it occurs to me that with some kind of deep learning,
| you could probably take a couple dozen pages of someone's
| _cursive_ , and turn it into a font with thousands of ligatures
| and variants that would be virtually entirely convincing.
| davchana wrote:
| I came across that in 2005s, & obviously could not pay that
| much; so searched around for free ways to do that. Found an
| article which listed to download that your website's grid;
| write with a thick pen; scan & then use FontForge to convert it
| to a font. Lot of labour. But I did it; & still have that font;
| used on many paper forms.
|
| Now recently few years ago I came across an app where you draw
| each letter on mobile; then it sends all data to its server &
| you get the font. It worked for few months, I made few
| variations of my handwriting, then its server stopped
| responding.
|
| Now I have another font where few glyphs of my signatures (few
| variations), my logo, my initials are as font; & I use it to
| sign checks or forms or such.
| DoktorEgo wrote:
| I don't see this mentioned anywhere here, but there's a website
| I came across years ago that allows you to do the same, but you
| just scan the sheet instead of mailing.
|
| https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
|
| Albeit it's not entirely free (pricewise or otherwise). I still
| think your second idea is better, where a learning algorithm
| "captures" handwriting and generates a font or more text with
| the same style. I can only imagine the implications in
| authenticity and forgery, though.
| soylentcola wrote:
| In the mid-2000's I got a Toshiba Portege convertible laptop
| off eBay for a few hundred bucks. It had an active digitizer
| built in and had some software that let you do something
| similar. It wasn't fancy enough to include alternates and it
| wasn't the best at connecting cursive, but if you mainly used
| print/non-script letters like I do, it was a neat trick to be
| able to use some semblance of my handwriting as a font in
| Windows.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I stumbled on this site a few months back and made my own font as
| well: https://kidpofy.com/
|
| It's supposed to be for archiving your kid's handwriting at
| different ages of their life but who says that has to stop at
| adulthood! :-)
|
| It gave me an error looking at the site on my phone but worked if
| I clicked thru the error, not sure how safe that is but to each
| their own.
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(page generated 2020-06-06 23:00 UTC)