[HN Gopher] Realistic computer-generated handwriting
___________________________________________________________________
Realistic computer-generated handwriting
Author : carl_dr
Score : 697 points
Date : 2023-01-26 10:32 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.calligrapher.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.calligrapher.ai)
| utsuro wrote:
| Interesting, but has relatively low character limit.
|
| Can't even fit the "Tears in Rain" soliloquy from Blade Runner :/
| aksgula22 wrote:
| nice, can we add some girl handwriting next
| gobdovan wrote:
| This would have been so awesome to have something like this in my
| high school years in Eastern Europe, where teachers ask for you
| to write essays by hand instead of typing them. The font is
| similar to my handwriting, but fails on letters with accents.
| mlindner wrote:
| For something called calligrapher I would have expected it to be
| able to do Japanese, but it just produces unreadable garbage when
| non-English is used.
| eruci wrote:
| Beautiful! Now if one can make this generate random handwriting
| styles, and save these styles for future use I'm set!
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This is perfect for those ransom letters I send out. I no longer
| need to search around for newspapers and am going to save a
| fortune on sticky tape!
| credit_guy wrote:
| So now I just need to go ask this startup to see their logs.
| I'll get your IP address in no time. Maybe I'll need a warrant.
| But I'm sure these guys will just be very nice and send me
| their logs on an ongoing basis.
| creata wrote:
| Fortunately, it works without an Internet connection!
| Gare wrote:
| Bad (or good) news, it's open source:
| https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
| criddell wrote:
| Just don't print it at home! Your printer is probably a snitch.
| est wrote:
| Or you can buy a plotter.
| fallingmeat wrote:
| oh it's nondeterministic! yeah this is fun
| sublinear wrote:
| I think the legibility slider can go quite a bit lower. None of
| the models are anywhere close to real world illegibility.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Needs a "doctor" mode.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Isn't it interesting that regardless of the culture, every
| nation seems to have "doctor" mode writing?
|
| I wonder how it comes to be.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I suspect its less to do with actual, objective legibility
| and more to do with patient anxiety. The things that
| doctors (and pharmacists, etc) hand-write tend to be
| personally important.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I was going to comment the same thing, but style 6 at min
| legibility is almost as bad as my handwriting.
| FailMore wrote:
| I agree too
| nirav72 wrote:
| A piece of code that can write cursively better than I ever could
| and l am from a generation where they forced us to learn cursive
| writing.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| Should it worry me that the legibility slider cranked all the way
| to zero is still more legible than my actual handwriting?
| smokeyfish wrote:
| Are you a doctor?
| wolframhempel wrote:
| to my parents' major disappointment - no :-(
| [deleted]
| atonse wrote:
| I first read that as "to my patients' major disappointment,
| no" and chuckled :-)
| kris_wayton wrote:
| I always wondered if pharmacists had any specific training in
| the terrible handwriting doctors put on prescriptions, or if
| they all just figure it out in their first year.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I always wondered if pharmacists had any specific training
| in the terrible handwriting doctors put on prescriptions
|
| One day my local pharmacist was in a chatty mood whilst
| filling my request and one topic that came up was doctor's
| handwriting.
|
| The answer is yes, they do (did ?) receive training in
| handwriting recognition.
|
| Basically it involves learning to recognise common
| abbreviations and mostly being very familiar with drug names
| and dosing.
|
| As the pharmacist said, when he received his training it was
| "easy" because the formulary was "somewhat shorter" than it
| is today. As a result he said his junior trainees struggle
| and frequently come to him guidance until they've had
| sufficient exposure.
|
| However with things moving to electronic prescriptions the
| days of deciphering will be relic of the past for many
| pharmacists.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| This reminded me, I once attended a lecture by a pharmacist
| who got interested in handwriting and showed how different
| conditions and medications might manifest in customers'
| handwriting.
|
| Looking at the samples, it was pretty fascinating.
|
| Since he undoubtedly read a lot of doctors' writing too,
| and since I personally know a doctor who abused their
| access to medication, I did wonder what questions this
| pharmacist would've had about local doctors...
| a9h74j wrote:
| Although correlated, I'm less worried about the doctors
| than all the prescription errors which were said to kill
| many people.
| ant6n wrote:
| Just let the computer do the handwriting and you'll be fine.
| icepat wrote:
| For accuracy, it needs negative legibility settings. Anyone
| who's been in a sprint retro with hand written action points
| knows this.
| soperj wrote:
| I expected actual calligraphy from calligrapher.ai :|
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible to "bake" some of the logic and
| patterns that emerge from this into a font using more advanced
| OpenType features.
| tincholio wrote:
| Well, calligraphy, it is not... Decent handwriting, though.
| dom96 wrote:
| I'd really love to read about how this was put together. Does
| anyone have any ideas about the high-level steps?
| a9h74j wrote:
| Trick: "Dear teacher, Johnny was sick yesterday and could not
| attend school. Sincerly, Johnny's mom."
|
| Anti-trick: Soon the teachers themselves will not be able to read
| cursive (or perhaps, recognize the spelling error).
| 60fps wrote:
| nice thread and a perfect way to introduce myself, so with that
| being said; this is my very first post -
| https://imgur.com/a/nGK2wB4
| msoad wrote:
| Struggles with "special" latin characters like U, ae, i etc
| albert_e wrote:
| This is excellent. Can someone knowledgeable weigh in on what it
| would take to make an API out of something like this so one could
| say integrate this into a document/image/presentation generator.
| Or for a simpler usecae - personalized greeting card generator.
| drKarl wrote:
| It reminds me of Turry...
| kolinko wrote:
| Awesome, but fails with accents etc.
|
| A case for polish: ,,Zazolc gesla jazn" - fails in many gunny
| ways.
|
| I also tried emojis - of course it failed, but now I'm super
| curious how would hand written emojis look like :D
| pndy wrote:
| > A case for polish
|
| I run it few times and some in some variants algorithm just
| gives up and produces some _noodles_ similar to "szlaczki" -
| the patterns kids train before starting hand writing.
| Definitely the issue of diacritical mark presence - maybe the
| input should pick the closest "clean" Latin letter before
| algorithm becomes aware of accents?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same with languages like Portuguese and French, it did not got
| any of them right.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It would probably look a lot like handwritten kanji.
|
| Asking various stable diffusion implementations, it looks like
| it agrees with me at least a little. When anything close to
| what I want is generated it tends to actually contain kanji
| like fire and life.
| layer8 wrote:
| Even ASCII characters like $&@ don't work.
| gobdovan wrote:
| This would have been so awesome to have in my Eastern European
| high school, where you're required to write essays by hand
| instead of typing them. The font it generates is similar to my
| handwriting but fails hard on accented letters though.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| To make it more useful for video overlays:
|
| 1. Add a way to set the background color, and / or all the
| background to be transparent.
|
| 2. Add a way to download the animation of the writing as a movie
| clip
| joshspankit wrote:
| Come to think of it, handwriting is one of the most perfect uses
| for "what's connected to what" AI.
|
| Love this
| SMAAART wrote:
| When you write in all caps there are some extra | added here and
| there
|
| https://i.imgur.com/HZHlDFs.png
|
| https://i.imgur.com/xF0pV6I.png
| 0027 wrote:
| This produces some really wonky numbers. "$800+$27.321 =
| $827.321" is more or less indecipherable
| GuB-42 wrote:
| For fun: max speed, max legibility, style 2, sentence "My first
| name is: bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla", stroke width doesn't
| matter.
|
| It may take a few tries but at some point, you may get some weird
| results (about 1/4 time for me). It may happen with other
| settings, but these work well for me.
| v8xi wrote:
| I went minimum speed, max legibility of "A quick brown fox
| jumps over the lazy dog" and it gives me "A quick brown
| foxeeeeeeeeeeeeeeejumps..."
| mach1ne wrote:
| Any idea what causes this?
| peaslock wrote:
| Neural nets often fail with (repetitive) gibberish output
| when the input is too different from the training data. This
| model appears to take in the entire text input at once or
| look ahead at the next input letters, so the unusual "bla
| bla" at the end can mess up outputs near the beginning.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The "bla bla" actually doesn't do much, that's the "My
| first" that triggers it most of the time. I only added the
| "bla bla" in the end to make the line longer because it
| looks better that way, but just writing "My first" or even
| "My f" is enough.
|
| It is described as "Realistic handwriting generator.
| Convert text to handwriting using an in-browser recurrent
| neural network", so, unlike GPT, it is not a transformer
| and it is small, so it most likely doesn't take the entire
| text input as once. Most likely, it simply overshoots the
| previous stroke and decides that a loop is the most
| appropriate way to continue, then it overshoots that loop,
| and again, and again, until by chance it stops overshooting
| and proceeds to the rest of the text. Cursive style like
| #2, the need for precise strokes (high legibility) and
| specific letter transitions seem to exacerbate the problem.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Example screenshot:
|
| https://snipboard.io/mxF8O0.jpg
| andai wrote:
| I got an even longer one! https://i.imgur.com/SvxL9IE.png
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/XXJeWBr
| [deleted]
| mawise wrote:
| I had a similar experience, haven't been able to reproduce it
| too consistently:
|
| https://snipboard.io/0j7CrT.jpg
| jdshupe wrote:
| I had it do this on the word "lazy". Just filled the screen
| with loops.
| blueblob wrote:
| The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
| hooande wrote:
| lol it's me signing a credit card reader
| kibwen wrote:
| I think a lot about how the written English language has been
| altered by technology. Latin majuscule letterforms were designed,
| AFAICT, to be easy to chisel into stone. Miniscule letterforms
| were later invented because they were faster to write, enabling
| monks to copy manuscripts more quickly. Printing press
| manufacturers saved money by getting rid of letters that could be
| replaced by combining others (the thorn), alternative letterforms
| (long S), and rejecting ligatures. Later, both
| typewriters/teletypes and low-resolution early computer displays
| would force English letterforms to be further simplified.
|
| To tell the truth, mostly I'm just envious of all the beautiful
| calligraphic scripts that are standard in other languages,
| whereas with English it seems we're stuck with sterile Helvetica
| clones. Maybe someday we can re-beautify everyday English.
| [deleted]
| bradrn wrote:
| It gets even more intricate! Until the 15th century or so,
| there were dozens of different styles of Latin script optimised
| for slightly different writing technologies [0], some so
| different to what we've now converged on that I hesitate to
| call them the same script. Our current handwritten lowercase
| letters developed around fountain pens and quills -- something
| I realised when I started using fountain pens and realised that
| lowercase writing suddenly became much more natural. On the
| other hand, our printed lowercase letters have changed little
| since Charlemagne standardised his miniscule script for maximum
| legibility with a broad-edged nib. Meanwhile, in Germany,
| blackletter styles developed for fast writing with the same
| nib; this eventually ended up as Sutterlin [1], which looks
| quite different to the script we're currently using. In England
| blackletter developed into 'secretary hand' instead [2], which
| again looks quite different. And of course there's more! [0] is
| the best overview I've found.
|
| (Thinking about this I do often wonder what a form of
| handwriting optimised for the ballpoint pen would look like...
| probably quite different to our current handwriting styles!)
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100403062849/http://guindo.pnt...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_hand
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You may want to experiment making characters slightly larger or
| smaller, and making some characters slightly more spaced than
| others.
| wistlo wrote:
| Handwriting simulator, yes.
|
| Calligraphy? Not quite. I'll still be paying someone to address
| my daughter's wedding invitations, I expect.
|
| Unless she elopes, that is (one can hope).
| Zopieux wrote:
| ... and of course it only supports a-z0-9 and probably one or two
| punctation characters. The ML diversity problem applied to
| language/script :-(
| theappsecguy wrote:
| This is awesome! Would be nice to be able to change colour
| spuz wrote:
| You can actually download the output as an SVG which will allow
| you to change the colour as you wish.
| intrasight wrote:
| I just see "Loading..."
|
| Anyway, was curious if this was going to re-creating my
| handwriting based upon my providing some samples.
| injidup wrote:
| So strange. It's failure modes are kind of random
|
| black farts - just generates squiggles 90% of the time
| https://i.imgur.com/znk9lj5.png
|
| red farts - works all the time https://i.imgur.com/KeL5DtF.png
|
| brown farts - works all the time https://i.imgur.com/IwwgQNM.png
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great, if one only writes English.
|
| It messes up all diacritics.
| kome wrote:
| it can't do accents
| danShumway wrote:
| As other people have mentioned, this seems pretty limited and
| does look like it struggles a lot with "uncommon" situations.
| Doesn't look like it handles stuff like line wrapping either,
| although maybe that could be a separate step.
|
| Still, incredibly fun to play with, and something I could easily
| imagine being useful at least for small projects if it was
| generalized just a little bit more and trained on more diverse
| datasets. Really cool project.
|
| I really like that you can play with speed using (roughly) the
| same style/legibility settings; it would be interesting to be
| able to simulate handwriting for a single "character" and subtly
| convey information visually about what state of mind the person
| was in whenever they were writing.
| legoxx wrote:
| very nice, just a small comment, this is NOT handwriting style,
|
| it should look like this in my book:
|
| https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS3tT5h...
| ygra wrote:
| Well, there are lots of different handwritings. Not everyone
| writes cursive (especially in the US it seems to be very rare).
| My own handwriting is something like a hybrid between cursive
| and print with a few contextual ligatures thrown in.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| so cool, can i export as svg?
| phonebucket wrote:
| Alex Graves (now at DeepMind) put a similar demo on his
| University of Toronto page a long time back:
| https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Yeah. Alex is so under-appreciated in the early-modern history
| of AI. This definitely works better than that did though.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| Really cool!
| vmarius wrote:
| Nicely done, but I think you have a bug:
| https://imgur.com/VXJeCmx
| itvision wrote:
| Steve Ballmer intervened!
| badcppdev wrote:
| The AI seems to be simulating a different type of stroke
| itvision wrote:
| It generates different writing even if you choose the same style.
| neophyt3 wrote:
| tried this -\\_(tsu)_/- did not work well
| jack_pp wrote:
| breaks regularly on 'hi' , the "i" is usually not dotted and if
| the 'h' is connected to the 'i' it usually doesn't read right
| terpimost wrote:
| Very nice! Big potential!
| micw wrote:
| Does not seem to be very consistent. When I generate 2 texts with
| the same "style", it never looks like written by the same writer.
| flockonus wrote:
| Kinda funny how the AI doesn't seem to know about Kanji but
| hallucinates some convoluted answer anyway! Try:
|
| Ri Ben
|
| then, the char limit:
|
| Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri
| Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri Ben Ri
| Ben
| tmtvl wrote:
| Forget kanji, it doesn't know about "=".
| pmarreck wrote:
| 1) I wonder if something like this exists, but for script.
|
| 2) I wonder if I can train an ML to do my handwriting.
| Version467 wrote:
| Combine this with ChatGPT and a Pen Plotter and you can offer
| heartfelt hand-written letters as a service. (That are neither
| handwritten, nor heartfelt, but people won't notice, or care.)
| intotheabyss wrote:
| One step closer to the movie Her
| jvm___ wrote:
| Seinfeld.
|
| George gets married because of a typo into an AI handwritten
| letter service he sent to his girlfriend.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Is this spitballing, or did that actually happen in the
| show? My memory is v.fuzzy.
| sbergot wrote:
| In "Her" a human is composing the letters so this is one step
| further.
| criddell wrote:
| I think all of the car dealers I've dealt with the past decade
| are doing something like this. I get "handwritten" notes from
| them a few times a year telling me the market is hot for my 5
| year old Subaru and I'd be a fool not to trade it in.
|
| I don't know if it's a machine writing the notes or if that's
| what salespeople do when they aren't busy.
| Shaggy2000 wrote:
| Japanese companies, such as Honda, have a history of using
| personal relationships and direct communication to get their
| products off the ground, such as in the case of Mr. Honda
| writing to thousands of dealers to ask them to stock his new
| invention, the bike with an engine, in order to help his
| company and the Japanese economy to recover.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I work for a company that writes a lot of the fundamental
| technology for car dealers. In most cases you probably are
| getting actual handwritten notes from salespeople. They'll
| absolutely put that minimal effort into lead generation.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| How is getting handwritten notes minimal effort?
| boplicity wrote:
| Just goes to show how little personalization matters.
| Unless it's actually personal, it's still fake!
| nirav72 wrote:
| Most likely mass printed for targeted mailing with a
| handwriting style font. I remember getting something similar
| in the mail written in what appeared to be blue ink from a
| ballpoint pen. Only to find out my wife got an identical
| piece of ad mail , just with her name at the top.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Last year there was a discussion about someone making a
| setup to send handwritten plotted letters here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28587458
|
| I noticed some similar letters several years ago and had a
| pretty negative response once I figured it out. But these
| might be enough better I wouldn't notice unless of course I
| see another one like you did.
|
| https://www.audience.co/did-you-receive-a-fake-
| handwritten-n...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _but people won 't notice, or care._
|
| Most people, yes. A few will definitely notice and care. Faking
| this stuff is the fast way to get on my shit list, though I
| realize I'm in a minority here. I am very pro AI in general,
| but I am extremely anti-deception. If you send me a 'hand-
| written note' that really wasn't, why would I trust you about
| anything else?
| cainxinth wrote:
| Ha, it's the thought that counts!
| universemaster wrote:
| It would be great to use this for complex latex equations.
|
| Often a hand-writing feel makes youtube math explainers and
| lectures much more absorbing.
|
| But, at the same time, handwriting makes videos a pain to edit to
| correct the mistakes that all math lectures longer than a few
| minutes inevitably have.
| theden wrote:
| "oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo", max speed, style 6
|
| https://i.imgur.com/eX4nhoA.png
| guelo wrote:
| Great tool for forging signatures.
| kokojumbo wrote:
| [flagged]
| petodo wrote:
| That's not really realistic, it can't even do normal cursive
| handwriting with first capital letter joined, I dunno anyone who
| writes like any of those 10 styles, maybe they are common in US,
| but certainly not in this part of Europe.
|
| Get back to me when it will knows at least something like this:
|
| https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5d1b0e1d28c12813e1255...
|
| or here especially 1st and 3rd line
| https://d50-a.sdn.cz/d_50/c_img_E_C/3VfFjd.jpeg
|
| Then we can talk about REALISTIC handwriting.
| zokier wrote:
| > That's not really realistic, it can't even do normal cursive
| handwriting
|
| There is no such thing as "normal cursive". Cursive as a
| general style is primarily defined by joined characters, which
| this generator definitely does, in contrast to print writing
| which has separated characters.
|
| Even formal cursive writing systems vary wildly in style and
| construction, and I'd venture a guess that vast majority of
| people do in practice have pretty sloppy style.
| petodo wrote:
| All styles I tried have first capitalized letter separated
| (not joined as it should be properly) and written in print
| writing, that's not really cursive by my standards.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > There is no such thing as "normal cursive".
|
| http://enwp.org/Teaching_script
|
| There exist handwriting styles that have been standardised by
| their national ministry of education or similar, and millions
| of school children each year learn it. It is true that quite
| soon the individual's styles diverge from the normal form.
| kris_wayton wrote:
| Realistic for me would be including small ink pools, skips,
| smudges, crossed out corrections, and so on.
| ljsocal wrote:
| It has issues with capital letters. One at the beginning of a
| word works correctly. Mor than one and it falls apart, i.e. III
| sandos wrote:
| Ooh, thats why I thought upper-case A was broken! Apparently
| only when you write an all-uppercase word.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm right handed, only 6 & 7 styles looked to have a right-handed
| slant.
|
| Perhaps a slant (skew) slider would be a nice touch.
|
| Also, none of the styles _stroke_ their dots (dotted "i", etc.).
| I know it might be derisively called "cheerleader style" (but
| it's the way I dot my i's to give the dot more weight).
| godmode2019 wrote:
| This is a very old project glad to see it get the credit it
| needs.
|
| One interesting thing is if you show someone this for a random
| sentence and ask them want do they think. They always say how did
| it copy my writing. Everyone thinks it looks like their own
| writing. Likely because its the average of all peoples writing.
| Try it out
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is incredibly cool.
|
| And it definitely feels like something the creator could (and
| should?) make money off of.
|
| Limit free usage to medium-resolution bitmaps and a subset of
| styles, but make paid downloads available for high-resolution
| SVG's and a wider variety of styles.
|
| I can also imagine there's a market for ersatz "handwritten
| notes" from companies that genuinely appear to be handwritten,
| rather than using a handwriting font -- to license the software
| itself as some kind of mail-merge plugin or something. Combine it
| with an autopen or something, and nobody could tell the
| difference.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _market for ersatz "handwritten notes"_
|
| Yes, this is already A Thing in marketing, though as you say it
| currently uses fonts & printing. I hate it and am biased
| negatively against any company that does this, because their
| marketing materials lied o me by pretending to be a personal
| communication, to get my attention for their mass-produced
| marketing message.
|
| _And it definitely feels like something the creator could (and
| should?) make money off of._
|
| No way! It should be reverse-engineered and reproduced so that
| nobody can make money by gatekeeping it. If we can automate the
| production of handwriting, we must be able to automate the
| production of automated handwriting generators.
| airstrike wrote:
| Man, these capital E's are ugly/lazy AF
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Non-english alphabets unreadable even with maximum legibility
| setting.
| bmn__ wrote:
| I have the feeling that the amount of programmers whose minimum
| acceptable standard for code is on the level of "garbage in,
| garbage out" is on the rise. I condemn this development, that's
| a lack of role models who can transmit the values of culture
| and discipline.
|
| If I had written that software, I would have made an effort to
| support the complete Latin script, or at the very least shown
| an error or a warning for unsupported letters.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Looks like it's based on this paper [1]. It's a recurrent
| neural network trained on online handwriting data. It means
| you record how the position of the tip of the pen changes as
| you write. The training data comes from the IAM On-Line
| Handwriting Database which has only handwritten English text.
|
| If you want to support a complete Latin script, you would
| have to generate a lot of training data yourself, preferably
| in multiple languages. Quite the effort indeed.
|
| 1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.0850.pdf
| [deleted]
| JamesCoyne wrote:
| Try: "This costs $2.00".
| etiam wrote:
| I had just been primed with
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34525750 and arrived
| expecting artistic calligraphy...
|
| That's probably a lot to ask.
|
| Has anybody got tips about interesting datasets in that space?
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| This is SUPER FUCKING COOL
|
| The UI is beautiful because it gets out of the way
|
| The fact that you have a built in SVG export is _chefs kiss_
|
| My only suggestion re the export is you should have it save as
| .svg, on my mac / chrome it just saved as an extension-less file.
|
| Is there any way it could output line paths instead of shapes? I
| would love to be able to use this with my pen plotter but because
| of the output it effectively does tiny traces around each letter
| instead of natural strokes like a person does
| [deleted]
| xcambar wrote:
| My first name contains one of the fewest used letters of the
| alphabet and in first position nonetheless: Xavier
|
| Let me tell you: the training data did not contain that many X to
| begin with :D
|
| The Xs at best look like Ts, at worst like malformed Os.
|
| Always funny to find the blind spots of some piece of tech.
| dubya wrote:
| Try 'XXX'. Definitely too much variation with what should be
| the same glyph. It doesn't seem to know about ampersands
| either.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| 6ix9ine puts the 9 as a G and the x is all sortsa fun
| variations. Sometimes it's a lowercase t, sometimes it's a
| bunch of loops, and sometimes it's two disconnected slashes.
| alt227 wrote:
| This is hilarious, its like its treating an X as a wonky t !
| jade-cat wrote:
| i recommend trying the phrase "sphinx of black quartz, judge my
| vow!" on style 6, with legibility set to maximum. sometimes it
| looks roughly right, sometimes it opens with
| "sphnnneoooeoeoeoeoevorneroerof black quartz"
| pmarreck wrote:
| wow! I was able to duplicate that!
|
| as usual, the errors are at least as interesting as the
| successes on new tech!
| xcambar wrote:
| Such a good catch!
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I like that phrase. On style 2 with high legibility (~75% to
| the right), max speed, and min width I ran it a couple times
| with good success then it looped off the screen for the next
| few runs.
|
| The same settings but with min speed got caught at the z,
| creating what looked like repeating waves then a few letters
| that I couldn't place from the phrase.
|
| Also amusing are the loops that get the tops cropped even
| though other letters extend higher.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| The training data didn't contain n, or characters with a tilde
| :)
| neogodless wrote:
| Oh, a bunch of XXX, ZZZ, JJJ turned into this:
| https://imgur.com/a/BVN9MRz (ran off the screen to the right)
|
| > My first name is: XXX ZZZ JJJ
|
| (max speed, max legibility, default stroke)
| gjm11 wrote:
| Cranking up the "legibility" I see plenty of perfectly
| respectable "x"s. Are you sure this is "not enough training
| data" rather than "actually, people writing quickly write
| pretty bad 'x's"?
|
| [EDITED to add:] Ah, oops, I see. You were talking specifically
| about _capital_ X. You are right and I was wrong: the model
| produces disastrous capital Xs even at high legibility
| settings.
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| Neat! Try "XxXxXxXxXx", max speed/legibility/width, style 2.
| The results are bonkers. It's just loops and scribbles.
| Interestingly, if you write your X's from top-right to bottom-
| left, top-left to bottom-right order, you can sort of see this
| in action. Grab a sheet of paper and try to write "xxxxxxxxx"
| really fast. You will see that loops are extremely common. I
| think this might be a coincidence, but it's possible it sees
| the kerning of two x's as a loop, then gets caught up in that
| false state of drawing loops.
| joshspankit wrote:
| With a couple of tries I got a perfectly legible... T
|
| https://imgur.com/a/PRl42rb
|
| To be fair, I kind of remember handwriting X (and x) as totally
| counter-intuitive in school.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| The x's are bad across the board I think. Although on the whole
| I think this is pretty cool.
| _ache_ wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you name is Tavier.
| notoverthere wrote:
| It does the same sort of thing for the @ symbol. They, too,
| look a bit like a lowercase letter 't'.
| folkrav wrote:
| Doesn't handle accents either haha. My first name has an "e",
| it shows up somewhere between a straight up "t" (funny that
| it's the same letter as your "x") or some garbled mess.
| zmk_ wrote:
| It's the same with capital Z.
| dspillett wrote:
| Common punctuation wasn't particularly common in the training
| set either: exclamations marks lack dots except style 6 where
| it is at the top (some Spanish in the training set? Or
| misclassified "i"s?), and [deity] knows what style 9 is doing
| with them. Didn't dare try an interrobang :)
| mnau wrote:
| > We love our customers. ~Robotica
| scrollaway wrote:
| It seems to me it only supports ASCII. It breaks on cyrillic,
| accented letters, less common punctuation marks, even some random
| latin letters.
|
| It's a very cool prototype but missing a LOT.
| therusskiy wrote:
| would be cool if there was an API
| llagerlof wrote:
| From a previous comment, it's an open source project!
|
| https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
| ygra wrote:
| Well, the source code is available, but as there is no
| license you can't really consider it open-source.
| hm64 wrote:
| A large number of handwriting synthesis demos are
| derivations of/inspired by Alex Graves's paper "Generating
| Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks". Alex's code is
| available under GPL-3.0 here,
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/rnnl/. One could also port
| the techniques described in the paper,
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850 using any modern machine
| learning framework.
| dimatura wrote:
| Gets confused with multiple exclamation or interrogation signs in
| a row; seems to forget about the bottom dots.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My very first test was: how similar is each instance of the same
| character? Because they always just fake handwriting and
| duplicate it and you can instantly tell it's just a font or
| whatnot. Not this one. Not only are they unique each time, but
| they retain the "style." Well done.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Looks lovely. Are you planning to add diacritics or Latin ext
| characters, (a, l, o)? I'm curious how an animation with them
| would look as normally I'd apply them either after each word or
| after a bigger chunk of a word.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Almost what I want. Is the generated written unique? I would love
| the chance of collision akin to UUIDv4. So I can track _similar
| but unique_ signature on digital documents.
| biztos wrote:
| On the one hand, the fact that anything outside of ASCII is a
| failure mode is good for a laugh.
|
| On the other hand, "AI" defaulting to a narrow and US-centric
| view of the world is not doing the discipline any favors.
|
| Is it really that hard to find training data?
| senbrow wrote:
| Someone created this really neat toy for us all to enjoy for
| free.
|
| They don't owe anyone anything, and certainly don't deserve to
| be used as an example of what's wrong with an entire
| discipline.
| certik wrote:
| I created this cursive handwriting OTF font that you can test in
| a browser (or any other program):
|
| https://certik.github.io/slabikar-otf/
|
| It correctly connects letters and it can do Czech and Slovak
| accents. It is based on a Metafont source (to be used in TeX)
| from Petr Olsak, I wrote Python code that reproduces Metafont's
| Bezier curves algorithm, generates curves as SVG, then calls
| Inkscape to convert the curve to its boundary, imports back into
| Python from SVG and then it generates OTF curves and the final
| font.
| sprak wrote:
| Great work! Any chance that you could add the two letters o and
| a?
|
| A would be the same as u but with an "a" as base.
|
| O would be the same as a but with an "o" as base.
| certik wrote:
| Yes, we can! Can you please submit a pull request here:
| https://github.com/certik/slabikar-otf, just add the new
| character definitions here:
| https://github.com/certik/slabikar-
| otf/blob/dce9fc9e575f7d6e..., here is an example how uring
| (u) is done: https://github.com/certik/slabikar-
| otf/blob/dce9fc9e575f7d6e....
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| Interesting: this cursive feels a lot closer than OP to the
| cursive i was taught at my Italian Public School: example here
| http://www.leomajor.pn.it/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/al...
| certik wrote:
| Indeed! The above cursive is a Czechoslovakian style from
| 1990s (I think it hasn't changed much since then), and most
| European countries have quite similar cursive. In the United
| States the cursive is actually similar also, but a few
| letters are different, notably: z, r, t and most uppercase
| letters. My kids learn it at public schools here in the U.S.,
| but it is secondary after print style and assignments are not
| accepted in cursive... (I am sure it varies from school to
| school though.)
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Would you mind if I tried to convert it into a single line
| opentype-SVG font for plotters?
| certik wrote:
| Please go ahead, that would be great. The output of this
| script: https://github.com/certik/slabikar-
| otf/blob/dce9fc9e575f7d6e... creates a single line SVG. The
| other scripts then feed it to Inkscape and read it back as
| outline, so you would skip this step. You can then use this
| script: https://github.com/certik/slabikar-
| otf/blob/dce9fc9e575f7d6e... to convert to glif and the rest
| of the pipeline to build the font. I think I implemented
| single line fonts in glif.py, but if not, it shouldn't be
| hard to implement. If you are interested in collaborating on
| this, please let me know, we can add it as another job at the
| CI to test this mode.
|
| Do you have a plotter? Send some videos and photos once you
| get it working!
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It is still far, far from realistic cursive writing(especially
| old documents). But it's a good starting point if you want
| synthetic training data for writing your own handwritten text
| recognition NNs (specially for less common languages). It's based
| on 10 fonts only. I saw papers that had systems using 5000
| different fonts to generate synthetic handwritten training data.
| progbits wrote:
| I've had a project idea similar to this in the backlog for years:
| personalized signature generator that can be used to deal with
| dinosaurs that still want printed, scanned and signed documents.
|
| Basically I want to take a pdf, turn it into fake scan image (add
| noise, some inkjet smear lines, random skew etc procedurally),
| then generate signature image to paste over that. Zero dead trees
| and screaming at printers involved.
| [deleted]
| dsego wrote:
| MacOS Preview app has a handy feature to add a signature via
| the trackpad or camera and then just paste it into any PDF.
| linschn wrote:
| Apart from the signature generation, here is another project
| that does the false-scanning and signature pasting :
| https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign
| lcrz wrote:
| These fake-scanner pdf generators always use a huge skew. A
| tiny (random) bit of skewing makes it seem more genuine, but
| using the same exact large rotation puts it in an uncanny
| valley.
| linschn wrote:
| https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign/-/blob/master/fal
| s.... Well the skew is random between 0 and 2 degrees.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I scanned my signature at high resolution from blank white
| paper, cleaned it up a little with Paint.net, and made the
| white areas transparent. Pasting that into documents has saved
| me a lot of hassle.
|
| Legally I'm pretty sure you could also just draw an X on there
| and you'd be fine.
| stefncb wrote:
| You might as well make a scan of your actual signature and make
| the generator overlay the image instead.
| layer8 wrote:
| It is trivially recognizable in PDF viewers like Adobe Reader
| that a signature image was pasted in (the image rectangle
| around the signature highlights), and can therefore be
| rejected as not being a genuine signature, unless you turn
| the whole page into an image to make it look like a scan.
| baq wrote:
| Just yesterday I scanned my signature and added it to Adobe
| Reader. It even automatically made it transparent in a correct
| way. It didn't add noise though.
| squarefoot wrote:
| As another user pointed out, it can't correctly write accented
| vowels. Curiously, it writes them quite differently if I add
| spaces between them, like it was attempting to translate the
| appearance of characters rather than picking them from a ascii
| table.
| daminimal wrote:
| It's awesome, but it isn't internationalised and does not mention
| not being. uooa letters ended up as weird strokes.
| dominick-cc wrote:
| This is neat. I'd like to hear a bit about how it works.
|
| There is a similar paid API that does something like this
| https://handwriting.io (seems like they are down now though) I
| used to use it for print projects back in the day.
| danielcampos93 wrote:
| Using this shows me how bad my handwritting is. Have to turn it
| down to minimal legibility to make it look like mine.
| ginko wrote:
| Sometimes it seems to tweak out on 'x'.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/l5X7oBL
| luguenth wrote:
| i had this behavior also on small letter "t"
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| if you want to break it just type any symbol
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I was surprised it failed even with n which is technically
| still a letter.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Capital 'Z' doesn't render well, either.
| massimosgrelli wrote:
| Who is behind this project?
| ape4 wrote:
| Nice that the download is a SVG file
|
| Using <path>
| kebman wrote:
| Looks pretty cool. Any support for Spencerian Script or
| Kurrentschrift? If that's the case I'd really love it!
| lvl102 wrote:
| Would be awesome if you can download it as OTF/TTF.
| Jarmsy wrote:
| How would that be able to work? - as it doesn't write the same
| character exactly the same twice, with both random variation
| and adapting the letters either side.
| [deleted]
| kennedy wrote:
| SO GOOD
| noisy_boy wrote:
| In order to be "realistic" it introduces too much variation
| between the alphabets; a real handwriting has generally less
| drastic variations and the degree of variation also varies from
| alphabet to alphabet.
| FatActor wrote:
| "real" handwriting also gets tired so it becomes progressively
| worse. unless the person writes a lot. which is why you see
| people who write left-to-write on a blank page compress and
| slant upward as they go.
| whitewingjek wrote:
| If you put an asterisk between two words, it really confuses it.
|
| Really neat app! I like the differences in outcomes each time.
| jchw wrote:
| I get some pretty wild output from symbols in general. For
| example try something like "@#$_*" and it's hard to recognize
| anything, especially run-to-run. Very neat app in any case, but
| I will admit I'm a bit memorized by what happens to symbols.
| joshu wrote:
| I wish this had centerline data so I could use it with my
| plotter.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| This is indeed a very cool demo, and runs fully client side. I
| have been trying to find a way to add this to my project for a
| while which is a client side static website. As pointed out in
| other comments, this is open source:
| https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
| mattsouth wrote:
| Good find. Im loving that the README of this project includes a
| Rick Roll
| gokuldas011011 wrote:
| Increase speed and decrease legibility, i got my signature..!!
| totetsu wrote:
| I did something like this but for dick drawings many years ago.
| tzot wrote:
| Then your favourite font must be Semi:
| https://www.dafont.com/semi.font
| totetsu wrote:
| I used this dataset
|
| https://github.com/studiomoniker/Quickdraw-appendix
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| Want to see if I could get it to do a cliche doctor's
| handwriting. It turned out pretty funny.
|
| Input: 500mg of Amoxicillin, 3 times a day for 7 days. Lowest
| Speed, Lowest Legibility, Lowest Stroke Width, Style 6
|
| https://i.imgur.com/lH0bPBs.png
| dwringer wrote:
| Got the dosage perfect. Pretty close on the xmosmrelin. But the
| latter half is far too legible still.
| ozym4nd145 wrote:
| If anyone's interested, I think this is the github url of this
| project (had to dig a bit since it's not mentioned in the page):
| https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
| hunta2097 wrote:
| Wow, it's 5 years old.
| a9h74j wrote:
| And still the style does not go to 11.
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(page generated 2023-01-26 23:00 UTC)