Create a font from your own handwriting

http://www.myscriptfont.com/

by loki_dx • 13 years ago

149 64 13 years ago

Osmium• 13 years ago

It'd be nice if there was support for multiple versions of characters and ligature support. But still, pretty damn cool.

Edit: Seems like they have a new version of the tool on PaintFont.com which does have support for ligatures!

Edit2: Just tried it in my lunch break. Worked perfectly :) Doesn't look much like my real handwriting due to the uniform spacing, but definitely fun to use.

maaaats• 13 years ago

Yeah, some naive space-optimization would make this so much better.

biot• 13 years ago

I've always wondered if that's possible: a font file where if you type the letter 'A' for example, one of five versions of the letter 'A' is chosen. And so on for other letters so that a bit of randomness is imparted to the "writing".

nsfmc2• 13 years ago

It is! Doing it right is the hard part since opentype is limited to very specific kinds of substitutions, so you don't get nondeterministic random, but you usually get something that appears random-enough. The canonical example of actually nondet-random is the font Beowulf[0], by letterror, i don't know that i can do it justice here, research it a bit to really get the story.

Two contemporary examples: Bello Script[1] and Trixie HD, although lots of people are really pushing opentype's features these days in novel ways.

[0] http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/

[1] http://www.underware.nl/fonts/bello/features/how_does_it_wor...

[2] http://trixiefont.com/story/index.html

mistercow2• 13 years ago

You can actually achieve pretty good results without even using different versions of letters. I did an experiment with this a few years ago when I was playing with an idea of a tool to produce artificial hand-lettering for comics.

Here's the basic algorithm:

1. Generate two maps of low frequency noise. Perlin noise would probably work well, but just blurred noise will do. If we're thinking in terms of blurring, the radius should be on the order of x-height/2. Call that scale "S". One map is for X and one is for Y.

2. Convert the text to Bézier curves.

3. Process those curves, subdividing any long curve segments until they are no longer than S.

4. Now, process the curves again, and for each point, look up the corresponding point in your two maps. Displace the point's position according to the map value, with maximum distance somewhere on the order of S/4.

5. Render the new curves.

The parameters would need to be tweaked (I'm reporting them from vague memory), but that basic outline can provide surprisingly convincing results when applied to a handwriting font. Note that I did not mention what order of Bézier curve to use. You can get good results even by converting to polygons, but the segment length will need to be shorter.

peter-fogg• 13 years ago

This is really neat, but the main reason I type as much as possible is because my handwriting is awful. I'd gladly use a service that made my scrawl a bit more legible.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Have a look through (http://briem.net/) for some hints and tips.

A few practice lines of zigs and zags and vertical dashes and C shapes makes a big difference.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD. One of the symptoms is fine-motor dyspraxia -- which usually shows up as chronically bad handwriting (guilty!).

croisillon• 13 years ago

I believe you can work on your handwriting the same way you work on drawing.

I learned to write pretty much by myself after my parents taught me to read and I didn't practice the m's and the o's exercises in 1st class (since I already _could_ write). This ended up in a horrible handwriting, which a lot of teachers criticized without offering any solution.

At the age of 14 I received an old metal dip-pen and I loved it but I didn't like the outcome, so... I started practicing, writing alphabets, letters, words, sentences, just for the pleasure of using the pen and finding the right shape for each letter. It is still a work in process though as I sometimes change the way I shape one or another letter and I still from time to time write down a couple alphabets.

I'm not claiming my handwriting is now fabulous, far from that, but I'm at least not ashamed of it and would gladly use it as a font (where appropriate).

bluedino• 13 years ago

There's no excuse for illegible handwriting. It can be as simple as taking your time and making half-decent looking letters.

<- Tired of attempting to read other's scrawl

tomjen34• 13 years ago

I don't know, I have two old dip pens (as well as ink for them) and yet whenever I use them it seems I just smear ink everywhere and make huge blubs on the paper.

Anyway LaTeX has beautiful fonts, so I wouldn't worry too much about it yet.

zenith2037• 13 years ago

Yes, now I can see my lovely hybrid cursive manuscript scrawl on the screen!

Would be fun to use that's for sure. :D

ToastyMallows• 13 years ago

I tried to use this before, but eventually I reached a paywall, can anyone confirm if this is still the case?

EDIT: My apoligies, that was http://www.yourfonts.com/ . I'll have to try this one out I've always wanted to.

marknutter• 13 years ago

Have you seen my handwriting?

IanDrake• 13 years ago

I know. Every time I pick up a pen it feels foreign.

xerophyte129322• 13 years ago

its ok bro, we're all key-board people here. our handwritings SUCK! Heck the best part about a computer science college was that most of the work was on computers so no more writing! :P

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

I had a theory based class last semester (no computers at all), and haven't had a real class in which I can't type everything in 2 years. During the midterm my hand started cramping because I hadn't written anything longer than a sentence or two at a time in years.

vacri• 13 years ago

I once worked with a specialist doctor whose handwriting was so bad, even he couldn't read it.

earlz• 13 years ago

I made a font like this once. I can't remember what tool I used, but I drew the characters with a mouse (at the time I did a lot of drawing with the mouse, so mouse writing was nearly as good as pen writing). It use to be online even just for the hell of it. Now I'd probably have to look in the backups.

The big problem I had with my font was that some characters were quite bigger or smaller than others, despite it "fitting" into the same size box. I wonder if they managed to fix that some how

tobltobs4• 13 years ago

creator of myscriptfont.com here. myscriptfont.com is an older version. You can find a better app under paintfont.com.

edwardy20• 13 years ago

Why not redirect the old domain?

tobltobs4• 13 years ago

That was what we did first. But a lot of people asked us to bring back myscriptfont.com because they did not understand this "create template" stuff .....

ryanlitalien2• 13 years ago

Just an FYI, the link to "tutorial" on the main landing page of paintfont.com is broken.

tobltobs4• 13 years ago

works for me and there is traffic on the tutorial page. What do you mean by broken? What is the url of this link for you?

jaxn• 13 years ago

You are probably sitting on the world's greatest resource for creating captcha images.

simonebrunozzi2• 13 years ago

Very smart. I was just thinking about it.

brucehart• 13 years ago

Love your sites! They are very well done. I'm curious as to how you are creating the fonts. Did you use a programming library or did you dig into the font format specifications yourself?

Also, this is just a minor suggestion, but I would love to be able to map a non-standard character (such as the copyright symbol) to my signature.

borplk• 13 years ago

Can someone who has tried this comment on the quality and experience?

actionscripted• 13 years ago

Super easy, very nice result. It smooths the scanned forms, so you get clean letters. Took about 5 minutes.

xerophyte129322• 13 years ago

I have been meaning to this for years! especially in college when faced with a teacher who forces you to submit hand written work :P

PS: Helps copy pasting in those assignments

tomjen34• 13 years ago

Idiot teacher. I get not wanting to have students use laptops in the front of the class, but as long as you don't copy from others how you produce your college assignments shouldn't be the teachers decision.

Anyway if he ever saw my handwriting he would change is policy - it actively scares people.

skion• 13 years ago

For me that would result in the ugliest font ever.

simonebrunozzi2• 13 years ago

I think there would be a tough competition on being the ugliest. I challenge you! :)

j_s2• 13 years ago

Microsoft shipped 'My Font Tool for Tablet PC' sometime around 2006. Good luck finding it now though -- the official download link is broken.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote-help/powertoys-for...

  > This PowerToy for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition converts your 
  > own handwriting into a TrueType font.

dwc2• 13 years ago

Can I have a font of EWD's handwriting instead of my own?

tomjen34• 13 years ago

http://www.fonts101.com/fonts/view/Uncategorized/34398/Dijks...

Though I don't get why you would want to, I have seen far more beautiful handwritting elsewhere (it is certainly prettier than mine, but that isn't saying something).

dwc2• 13 years ago

I've always thought his handwritten stuff was striking, and wished my handwriting was as distinctive.

overload119• 13 years ago

A little while I go I did this in HTML and Javascript, it won't let you extract a .ttf but the basic idea is there. http://fontsie.herokuapp.com/

cududa• 13 years ago

Man, this brings back memories of calling into The Screensavers in 2004 - this tools has been around close to a decade!

btbuildem• 13 years ago

You know what would be amazing? Some sample images of handwriting and example sentences made with the generated font.

dbarlett• 13 years ago

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.kk.org/cooltools/2013/07/font.j...

tobltobs4• 13 years ago

What do you mean by "auxiliary characters" do not work and what where the errors while importing?

setitimer• 13 years ago

I don't really care for the template model; it won't look like your actual handwriting because most people don't write individual letters in little boxes the same way they write sentences.

I would be really impressed if the template consisted of a set of phrases you had to transcribe, and then it asked you to confirm the letter choices if there is doubt, and created composites where there are more than one of the same letter in the sample.

codereflection• 13 years ago

Forget my handwriting, I'm interested in using this for creative font design.

bjterry• 13 years ago

I was going to post a link to an image of this font in vim, which looks quite funny, but then I realized that I don't know if I want everyone on the Internet to be able to copy my handwriting.

themodelplumber• 13 years ago

Back in the 1990s there used to be computer magazine ads for this. The ads included spaces for you to hand-write various letters and numbers. Anybody remember that? Mail it in and they mail you back a font.

marknadal2• 13 years ago

This is more than fantastic! Just imagine making custom icon fonts to use on websites! A full symbol set done in 5 minutes!

gus_massa• 13 years ago

In the additional letters, the small ñ is missing (Capital Ñ is in the list). It's a very used letter in Spanish. (Additionaly, the Ç and ç are missing they are used in Portuguese.)

I don't know how this can be solved in the general case. Maybe add 10 free letters and ask the user to supply the unicode number, or type/copy the letter in a text field of the web page.

Create a font from your own handwriting

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