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Comment by logfromblammo | Hacker News Reader

Egads, it looks like a handwriting font. I have never seen its match for legibility.

Last month I went to my parents' house and cleaned out a bunch of my old crud. Which included school notebooks and books back to 1980 (at which time I had access to computers and typed all my papers). I was shocked (as was my kid) at how clear and legible my old notebooks were.

Nowadays I do write stuff but summarize it into the computer. I've tried various tools for automatic capture (e.g. livescribe) but they don't work that well. I realized that the probably would have worked great with my 35-years-ago handwriting.

I do wonder whether given enough effort you could train an OCR program to be pretty good at recognising one person's handwriting. Like if you meticulously corrected the output and added those corrections to your training set, would it eventually be perfect (or close enough anyway) or would it hit some sort of fundamental limit?

Clearly some peoples' handwriting sure. Good handwriting recognizers take advantage of stroke recognition, which you can't do by OCRing after the fact.

In addition my handwriting has become terrible. If I check my notes soon after writing them (within the same day) I can often tell by making out a few words and remembering what was being discussed when I was marking that part of the page :-(. A couple of days later I can barely understand them and longer than that I might as well forget it.

I could probably get by making random marks on the paper!

It's so sad, because when I was a scientist and had to maintain a lab notebook other people could easily read my notes (and they had to be clear for IP reasons). Or maybe I should look at it the other way: it's not sad, because it doesn't matter as much any more.

Yes. In fact, the way he used hyphenation at the end of a line made me go back and look at each letter to make sure it wasn't a font. They are very consistent, but not exact clones. Makes me wonder if there are ways to make fonts that use multiple versions of a letter to make them appear to be more hand written. I bet you could program one of these to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce35RAMMQug

The OpenType [1] font format does allow for stylistic alternates [2], which is basically what you're suggesting, in that different forms of characters are included and can be selected based on rules (like ligatures) or I believe selected at random. When used with a handwriting font it does more closely resemble natural handwriting to the casual observer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Advanced_typography [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font#Character_variants

I hate to disagree with Dijstra, but it looks like Comic Sans. It's not joined up; I think it's typical of draftsman's annotations on technical drawings rather than handwriting.

(Charles Rennie Mackintosh has particularly lovely drafting letters; turned into the Hill House font.)

His handwriting has in fact been fontified.

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