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Comment by sverhagen | Hacker News Reader

I'm still surprised how often I get still direct mail with something "handwritten" on it, where it's obviously not, because every same letter looks the same.

This seems like a problem solvable with just software, i.e. introducing artificial variations in the fonts. Why the seemingly overly complicated jump to using real pens in a plotter?

It's the font improvements that could possibly fool me, not the indentation of a real pen.

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Adobe’s CFF font format (found tucked away inside OTF font files) has a ‘random’ operator, though most font handlers I’ve seen don’t bother to implement it.

I think a naive randomness would look bad. As in "I have 3 variations of each letter and choose one on random". Because how I write a letter is influenced by letters before (so have to create ligatures I guess). But for the same reason, randomly making some variation to the letters would feel "off" if it doesn't take into account the letters before and after. There is a flow to writing.

Of course, doing anything is better than having the two e's in "meet" be identical, which spoils it being real handwriting from the get-go.

Seems like the sort of thing machine learning actually ought to work quite well on, if you had enough hand written letters as training samples.

Fonts already have this power, which is part of why they're so complicated. "contextual alternates" is the term for search

Thanks. https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/opentype-at-work-co...

Was a good description. The "horoscope" example in how it connects the r and s is similar to what I meant. Having to create ligatures for that.

It's hard to introduce random into actual fonts. I don't even know how I'd do that. What I could've done is just generate the SVG and then print it, that would've been a lot easier but way less fun.

The reason you get crappy printed mail that's obviously a fake is because it's cheap and easy. Not everyone wants to build robots.

https://www.calligraphr.com/en/docs/tutorial2/

How about this?

Create hundreds of variations of a font by making small random changes to each character. Then set each character on an envelope to use a random font from that set.

I have no idea if this is possible, but I remember an article in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" about Knuth's "Metafont". It sounded like one could define certain variables to alter the equations of the font. This could be one way of easily introducing randomness.

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