Show HN: Calligraphr – Convert your calligraphy into a vector font | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Calligraphr – Convert your calligraphy into a vector font

calligraphr.com

76 pointstobltobs24 comments

Great idea! I remember doing this 10 years ago following a tutorial which had a form to fill out, and then downloading a shareware font editor. I'll bookmark this site for my next personal font project.

This might be a little morbid, but I had an idea which would fit this site well. Promoting your site to those who would like to preserve a very personal aspect of their lost loved one. Was thinking about this because my next font project involves me going through my mother's letters and scrapbooks for lettering samples. I lost her two years ago and think a font of her writing would be one of the best ways of remembering. I think a lot of other people would feel the same.

This looks great! However, I find the pricing odd. Is this really the kind of thing someone is going to pay monthly for, as in see consistent usage? I think a more appropriate pricing structure would be either pay per user or pay for credits, which could then be used.

Not sure I understand either. At the top of the pricing page, "pro" is advertised at "$6.90/month" however at the bottom of that page they state:

"We do not offer subscriptions as most of our users do use Calligraphr.com as a one-off activity and we don't want to charge you just because you have forgotten to cancel our subscription."

Yes I was going to say the same as this. Looks great otherwise.

Agree, confusing. I interpreted it to mean $6.90 gets you access for one month. They do not automatically charged you at the end of the month, you have to buy it again.

The logical pricing would be per font? and you could modify each font you bought indefinitely (except maybe not upload new templates after the first month, to possibly prevent people from creating new fonts out of just one).

Back in the day I used Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition My Font Tool to create a font from my handwriting. I couldn't find a link to download it from Microsoft these days but some of the semi-sketchy download sites claim to have it.

Internet Archive to the rescue: http://web.archive.org/web/20051223202032/http://www.microso...

These projects are neat.

What I really want is a custom font of my handwriting that wiggles each character just a little bit, to better simulate my own handwriting.

I've poked at this problem a few times. I couldn't figure out how to encode the variations in the font.

Ages ago, there was an AutoCAD plot driver (from Autodesk dealer McNeel & Associates) with a hand plot feature. It'd fudge lines so they'd look like they were hand drawn. So maybe the trick for a hand written font is to post process the vectors.

    > What I really want is a custom
    > font of my handwriting that wiggles
    > each character just a little bit

About an hour ago, I replied to this with "You can use ligatures for that". Then I thought about it and thought "I'd better explain what I mean". And I was thinking of a system where you use characters near another character - even those up to two or three characters away, to essentially act as a random seed for the selection of a given character, using a very large number of pre-generated ligatures.

Then I thought: huh, that's pretty clever. I should look at patents for that.

Anyway: someone else got there first: read this:

http://www.underware.nl/case-studies/random-vs-clever/

Very cool read thank you for sharing!

Given that I am doing that daily in handwriting, I suppose that's prior art?

An interesting fact of the history of self modifying fonts is that one of the first of those fonts, the FF Beowolf, was created by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland. And Just van Rossum is the brother of Guido van Rossum.

Some more details from FontFont: "FF Beowolf was born at the end of the dark and murky 1980s when Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland found a way to change the programming in PostScript fonts. When printed, each point in each letter in every word on the page would move randomly, giving the letters a shaken, distraught appearance."

Calligraphr does support something similar. You can create multiple variants of a glyph and Calligraphr then creates OpenType CALT features which select a variant depending on the character which comes before or after.

There is some very interesting stuff being done in this area. For example, this font[1] selects alternates as you type:

[1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/47374155/Futuracha-Pro-Font

This is neat! I recently worked on something similar (on a much smaller scale!) for a low resolution bitmap font. The code is a hack but basically takes pixels in a GIMP file, converts them to vectors, and eventually spits out a TrueType font file. Of course, this result is primitive and has none of the cool features listed on your page!

https://github.com/rndmem/mem-font

This software doesn't split up the grid for you, but rather requires each letter be input completely separately:

https://github.com/aizenbit/Scribbler/wiki/User-manual

Free alternative: http://www.myscriptfont.com/

Althoug I had to edit my scan in Gimp several times before a decent and usable font came out.

Calligraphr has a free plan also. And a much better image processing, images taken with a camera are usually good enough, you don't need a scanner anymore. You also can edit characters after importing if there should be some artifacts. Myscriptfont also doesn't support Ligatures or character randomization and only a very restricted character set. Disclaimer: Myscriptfont is also a project of mine.

Is it possible to do this with any other/all languages?

I'd love to see some persian calligraphy done this way but I cant imagine how hard it would be to map all of the characters properly...

Calligraphr tries to support as much scripts/languages as possible. Persian/Arabian scripts are not supported currently as they are really complicated. At the moment we try to improve the support for Japanese.

Does anyone know if the opposite exists? That is, I have hundreds of semi-structured handwritten pages which I'd like to scan or photograph, and get decent text files out of.

You are looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition .

You can try some OCR, and the DJVU format can handle text data linked to character positions in scanned text.

http://djvu.org/resources/embedding_transcripts_in_handwritt...

Neat! To convert more visitors you'll want to show more examples. I found myself thinking "but what does it look like?"

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