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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each?

Sadly, the screenshot looks obviously artificial to me. Like handwriting fonts, I'd be very surprised if anybody thought it was really handwritten.

It's not open source (because it is my handwriting (because my progressive MS means I can't do it manually)), but here's my hack: https://imgur.com/a/frqG0cu

As sjv says above, there are still plenty of tells in mine. So I think this module is very unconvincing.

Maybe I've spent too much time being finicky or am just being braggy (definitely not beyond me, sorry), but 'realistic'?

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> How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each?

Most of the people I know do this. Myself, I have never ever written with joined letters except when required to in school.

I consider it a leftover from the era of fountain pens (which are terrible UX for me as a left-handed writing LTR languages).

Even my signature is based on separate letters (tho blurred together as sigs usually do).

Fascinating. Thanks for responding.

Can I ask what age-group you/they are? And it sounds like you had to write joined-up at school. Why would you stop? Isn't it so much faster?

I went to a snooty high school where fountain pens were compulsory (this was the 80s, not the 50s!). But writing was taught joined-up from pencils in infant school, from when you knew your whole alphabet. It never occurred to me to not join. It would have looked like a very small child's writing. Interesting though that has changed.

My wife is a grade school teacher, and disagrees, but I totally think that teaching handwriting is a waste of time. I wasn't anywhere near as fast writing as typing. I would have been much more productive with a laptop in school.

Anyway. I'm rambling now. Thanks for the response! I stand corrected.

I'm 41 - yeah we had learned both joined and "printed" (as we'd call them) letters, with the intention that for handwriting you'd use joined, but it was only required, for a bit, in lower grades in Croatian classes (ie. that'd be English classes in the US/UK/etc).

That was some 33 years ago but I have an 8yr old now and that part of the curriculum is basically the same.

Both then and now kids only need use pencils for this, thankfully :)

For myself, written joined up is more effort and slower than just individual letters. I don't know if that's due to less practice in it, or due to left handed needing to push the pen(cil) more when writing in that style.

I'm way faster touch typing (tho not on a screen keyboard!). If it were up to me, kids today would learn the easiest handwriting method (I believe that's individual letters) and typing, instead of two ways of writing.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Always interesting to find how somr things I take for granted are done/seem elsewhere!

> Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each?

As an anecdata, Alfred Wainwright did all his books like that (and justified the text, to boot.)

cf https://www.ramblers.org.uk/-/media/Images/Walk%20magazine/F...

I love his books. Gorgeous.

I think this was more his graphic design style for his books. As you say, the justification shows there's nothing impromptu about it. Here's how he wrote his letters, notes, drafts and so on: https://www.grough.co.uk/lib/img/editorial/wainwrightmanuscr...

I'm not splitting hairs on what 'handwriting' means. I'm fascinated by that era when books with complex text/visual interactions were far cheaper to create by hand. An example of an old magic book I have: https://imgur.com/a/8Bu9ML1 It's hard to beat Wainwright though.

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