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 browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.
Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.
Seems like open source is the way to defeat this. Anyone can easily create a competing service, which they then have to buy out, but the cost of setting up a new one is minimal. Interesting business model that feeds on anti-competitive businesses.
You'd think this should encourage people to build carbon-copies of the tools that have been bought out in the hope of being bought out... It's only a sustainable model if it's fringe enough and with low enough purchase amounts to not eventually become an exit strategy for people who might not even have tried otherwise.
I really wanted to make this work with my daughter. She's 9yo, and she filled out the form, and we scanned it with a real scanner. I'll admit we didn't have a felt tip pen, but we did have a grea black ink gell pen.
But something about the way the app applied the threshold on the scanned image, made the letters really broken. Maybe having a thicker pen would be the solution.
I have long theorized that it is inscrutable for a reason: as a bar to laypeople reading a/o editing prescriptions.
Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name.
(Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)
Had to dig to find this but back in 2009 I was bored so I made a font based of my handwriting. I had a Wacom tablet and used this font creator- I'm pretty sure it was called Fontographer. Anyways it's still floating around the Internet: https://fontmeme.com/fonts/mattfont-font/
I'm dysgraphic with a small essential tremor, and often write in a hybrid between cursive & block gothic. I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them for each letter to look like my handwriting.
My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.
> I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them
I took this approach once and enjoyed the result. I filled out 10 copies of the template of a handwriting font generator and generated all 10 fonts. Then I wrote a python script to process a libreoffice document. If it saw the 'handwriting1' style anywhere in the document it would pseudorandomly alternate between fonts. Since uncanny resemblance of two adjacent letter is the biggest giveaway that a handwriting font is at play, I made sure my script would change the font within a word if there were two adjacent 'T' or 'S' characters.
I've since lost the code (it wasn't something I needed to often use) but with LLMs these days I'm sure I'd be inclined to build something better -- for instance, performing the randomization within a single font file, and using custom glyphs for adjacent 't' characters that might have a common crossbar, improved support for other languages I use, or rendering a particular case of my legal name as a signature.
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.
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.
OP double negated - cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.
Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.
There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.
My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
I've used iFontMaker for this on the iPad - quite amusing to be able to select my own monospaced font for terminals (even if it is just "old man traced over Courier Prime badly".)
Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.
The instructions say that rows 2 and 3 in the template can be either lower or upper case. How does the website determine the case in those rows? Does it simply check if row 1 looks different from the other rows?
Not sure it would work in my case. I do love to take the very different freedom it brings. For example the mid bars of a t is often taken as an opportunity to go through above the whole word. But I wouldn't do it every single time, as it would feel too much overload.
I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.
Amazing way to show-case a tool (all in-browser, can be done so simply), super disappointed in the result. I took care writing all the letters, but when I looked at the generated font, even some of the corner markers ended up as letters!?
Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?
Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.
Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.
[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf
But something about the way the app applied the threshold on the scanned image, made the letters really broken. Maybe having a thicker pen would be the solution.
She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...
Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name.
(Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)
My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.
I took this approach once and enjoyed the result. I filled out 10 copies of the template of a handwriting font generator and generated all 10 fonts. Then I wrote a python script to process a libreoffice document. If it saw the 'handwriting1' style anywhere in the document it would pseudorandomly alternate between fonts. Since uncanny resemblance of two adjacent letter is the biggest giveaway that a handwriting font is at play, I made sure my script would change the font within a word if there were two adjacent 'T' or 'S' characters.
I've since lost the code (it wasn't something I needed to often use) but with LLMs these days I'm sure I'd be inclined to build something better -- for instance, performing the randomization within a single font file, and using custom glyphs for adjacent 't' characters that might have a common crossbar, improved support for other languages I use, or rendering a particular case of my legal name as a signature.
I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.
The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...
Understandable.
Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.
There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.
Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.
Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.
I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.
And learning to write in 'fonts' (hands) like block-print is still a form of calligraphy.
Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?
"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."
If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?
Browser can be treated as loader of code to be executed only locally with Local only data.
i hate js, but it's doable
Kids are being taught cursive again. Texas has been doing it again for awhile.
No idea why they stopped teaching it for a few years, kind of messed those kids up.
How do people have a signature if they don't know cursive?
Do they just print it twice lol?
á é í ó ú?
Signed, Mom
S I G N E D , M O M