Discussion

FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free

jruohonen: The idea is cool, but, well:"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."

phoronixrly: Are implying that the lack of data harvesting is a disadvantage?

codetiger: It not a disadvantage but a rare trait nowadays.

vaylian: 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?

iberator: well makes sense if JavaScript is run 100% locally.Browser can be treated as loader of code to be executed only locally with Local only data.i hate js, but it's doable

Thomashuet: Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.

Daneel_: I think that might be generational. I don’t know anyone under 40 who writes in cursive. I certainly don’t.

nacozarina: new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !

Wowfunhappy: Your post makes it sound like you consider this a bad thing?

psychoslave: 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.

psychoslave: 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.

Angostura: Still taught in uk primary schools as the fastest way to get words down in paper

Fnoord: I hereby declare I''ll be unfit for school next Friday due to an illness.Signed, Mom

ixvo: This works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.

feverzsj: That'll be the ugliest font.

ixvo: Only applicable for retarded countries where people don't write in cursive

guenthert: Makes me wonder whether there are diction tests (I feared/hated those with a passion) in the USA?

catoc: A wise doctor once typed…

micw: Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?

himata4113: Text encryption, I like it!

roughE: Asking the right questions

catoc: I don’t see the downside here.If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?

4ndr3vv: I HEREBY DECLARE I' LL BE UNFIT FOR SCHOOL NE XT FRIDAY DUE TO AN ILLnESS .S I G N E D , M O M

easton: Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.

xmattx: Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.

stratosgear: Same here. The characters need to move higher. They look like I wrote them below the baseline... :(

alsodumb: My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)

scotty79: A sign of how irrelevant handwriting became is that there are no popular AI models that aim at cloning it, even though it should be fairly easy.

axegon_: Awesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin

ghrl: 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.

Y_Y: Ah, the Overleaf model.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.

karmasimida: Well I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it

amigocesar: What about tildes, accents, cedilles?á é í ó ú?

tazjin: 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.

jech: > 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.

d1sxeyes: 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.

okamiueru: 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.

c7b: Interestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak as to how well the open source version works.[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

vidarh: 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.

BoredPositron: It's more cultural than generational.

IAmBroom: It's both. In the US, schools are turning away from teaching cursive, which clearly makes a generational cut.

IAmBroom: Never even heard that term before. So: no.

IAmBroom: 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.)

nbernard: IIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.

beardyw: Yes, I thought something which could make my handwriting more like a font would be useful.

SAI_Peregrinus: 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.

otikik: Not great for doctors

al_borland: 30 years ago there were ads in SkyMall for a service that did this. I always really wanted to do it as a kid. That desire has faded over time, but those ads really stuck in my mind.

rustyhancock: My experience was a bit of a disaster.It's worth noting that it's only at the end that it turns out you have 3 options for using the rows (you can't say use row 1&2 caps but row 3 lowercase)For whatever reason it really struggled to detect the cross hairs. It thought the top left cross hair was the O.I had intensely compress the black white range to make it detect at all.What should it look like btw?Also even though it detected A thru F great it kind of fell to pieces down the page suggesting that the registration isn't good enough to detect each block.More registration marks and ones that are more distinct than cross hairs would likely help.I don't really know what's wrong!

dpoloncsak: 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

mft_: A related but different approach I liked was taken by Amy Goodchild, who is an artist that uses code for her creations.She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...

lastdong: This is really cool, educative and very well written.

simonebrunozzi: Tangentially related: anyone has suggestions on an "automated" way to "print" pages with a typewriter? If you want to have papers that "look" as typed with a typewriter, as opposed to printed with laser printers and such.

electroly: This is what a teletype is: it's a typewriter with a serial connection. You send bytes over the serial cable and it types them.

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

vasco: You can use a picture of anyone's handwriting. There's high res pictures of medieval monks handwriting and so on that probably would be really cool as fonts.

airstrike: [delayed]

Fnoord: 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

crypto137: I mean there is a solution to this"Can I buy your company?""No."

bovermyer: Personally, I like that my handwriting has tiny inconsistencies in every character and rarely-repeated flourishes.I don't want to manufacture something that looks like it, but loses the soul of it.

jaxn: I used something like this tool to create 10 different fonts of my handwriting. Then I wrote scripts to randomize which font was used for each character, ensuring that no word had that same variant of a single letter. It worked incredibly well for a personalized printed mail campaign. It really did look hand written.edit: basically what DANmode replied to the same parent. I did this 10 years ago while running for political office.

MengerSponge: The competition to Overleaf is just running LaTeX locally, which costs approximately zero dollars and it's faster! But it's a little less convenient for a solo author, and a lot less convenient for a collaboration.

toast0: My 3rd grade teacher wrote something like this regarding my handwriting in my final report card:We've done all we can for toast0. But he'll have a secretary so it'll be fineI never did get to have a secretary, but thanks to COVID learning losses, I do manage to have a lot better penmanship than about half of kids going into high school this year. :)

ynac: We had a science teacher in 7th grade whose teaching style was all overhead notes. She'd give us time to copy them into our spiral bounds or 3-rings and when we were all done, she'd swap for the next slide.She didn't lecture but she did tell stories about her farm, hunting, and occasionally some science. We could ask questions and tell stories if we finished copying the notes before everyone else was done. So, one of the takeaways from her class was getting very efficient and neat with my writing. I tried to write in a clean all caps and eventually learned which strokes were best for speed and spacing. I still use that hand-font and I always think of her sitting on the wall radiator laughing through some story of trying to fix a bad situation.

chrismorgan: I never did get my pen license—they insisted on the dynamic tripod grasp, which I never could cope with (I prefer lateral quadrupod). So I and one other had to keep using pencils until the end of grade four, after which point they forgot about the matter.My elder brother had (simplifying the story a lot) such bad handwriting that they let him type his year 12 exams, turning a possible disadvantage into a frankly unfair advantage, especially in English, where being able to output four times as fast is valuable. Wish I could have done that.

kiyundai: No need for encryption if no-one can read you ;)I'm in the same boat haha

jdelman: 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.

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

necovek: 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.

necovek: 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...

codecarter: As a calligrapher, I appreciate this.

markvdb: See also: https://primarium.info/handwriting-models .

jagged-chisel: Add this to your list if things you try: https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/02/a-hyperrealistic-typewrit...Article links right to the font.

kmoser: This is cool, but when viewed up close, laser-printed letters still lack the fuzzy edges and imprinted texture of letters created by typewriter slugs.

jagged-chisel: Indeed

burdin: fun tool! last month, i built a similar one but with focus on drawing directly on mobile. no need to print pages. open source!https://handofyou.app

markdown: Dr. Kumar?

fdb: Hey, cool, that's using my library: https://opentype.js.org/It's nice to see it pop up in so many places!

ChrisPirillo: So VERY grateful!

ChrisPirillo: You configure that in the Configuration section. ;)

ChrisPirillo: Try again? Same template should work (with current fixes in place).

ChrisPirillo: Please, try again. I pushed a few fixes out this afternoon.

deposittag: 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.

ChrisPirillo: Try it again. Fixed quite a few bugs today.

varun_ch: The website does say that it was ‘vibe coded’[0] so perhaps the author didn’t test it very thoroughly? They apparently do ‘vibe coding’ courses so.. that’s something.[0] https://arcade.pirillo.com/

ChrisPirillo: It's not a course.What I do is free and intended to be workshops for non-technical users to understand the power of technology rather than slamming it in their face.

ChrisPirillo: Try it again. Made some beefy updates earlier today to catch outliers.

ChrisPirillo: Wow. :DThanks for picking this up! More to come. I'm working on adding color support right now.

kevin_thibedeau: Run it through a dilate filter a few times.

rustyhancock: It's really impressive for what it is.I tried it various pens and paper sizes and printer scales. And it suddenly worked but only if scanned at low res (200DPI).Still I got a partially working font at the end

varun_ch: For sure! I was so surprised to see that this was done all in browser. I mean there’s no reason that shouldn’t be possible in 2026 considering there’s services that do this server side, but still it’s always impressive when something like this comes along.

theultdev: People write in cursive all the time. You mainly sign in cursive.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?

DonHopkins: Arguing that something is good because Texas is doing it is ultimately a self defeating argument that reveals a lot about you (as do the other internet incel horseshit and exuberant defenses of Scott Adams' racism and misogyny you post). Do you mean systematic institutionalized racism, rampant gun violence, and frequent school shootings are good too?

theultdev: It's not good "because Texas is doing it"Never said that, learn to read.All schools were doing it until several years ago.But noone even read now so I guess they dropped it....

rustyhancock: Yes seems to be working well now!

guenthert: Too late to edit, 'dictation' was meant. Seems I still suck at spelling ;-/

Angostura: Still no :)