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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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    > 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

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