Hacker News Reader

Comment by PuffinBlue | Hacker News Reader

If you give it a try you'll see it doesn't work well and it's nothing like cursive or 'natural' handwriting. The sheet you have to fill in changes your natural handwriting fairly dramatically (it did for me at least).

View on HN

Because in cursive writing, the letters are connected - that's something that works in high quality, high effort script fonts. They way they do it is to use OpenType replacement features for various combinations of letters. For example, there are a bunch of a's in one font, and when the OpenType system detects a+n, it chooses the a that is drawn to connect with the n. There also may be different versions of the letters, so that the text gets more rhythm (like naturally written).

It would actually be an interesting machine learning application not only to recognize letters from an actual sample (say a document in cursive writing), but also to understand how the letters connect and then create a cursive font based on that.

Yeah, i was thinking that they should have a different template pdf where the letters are not shown in the boxes, but perhaps beside or underneath the boxes. When you're writing over those typed letters, you're more likely to trace them, resulting in a less natural handwriting.

Did the same for me too, seems logic if you look at the limited "data sample" they can analyze with the sheet you fill in

Reply on news.ycombinator.com