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Comment by muhehe | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to have more glyphs for the same letter and choose one randomly? When I write I never have two letters exactly the same. That's the problem with all these "handwritten" fonts - they look too consistent to be written by real hand :) (It would be a really weird feature for a font, I admit)

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Open Type allows it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dotnet/n...

One thing you can do is use ligatures so that specfic combinations of letters look different. It won't be random, but at least there'll be variation.

E.g. 'A' followed by 'n' could have one ligature that looks like "An", and 'A' followed by 't' could have another ligature that looks like "At" where the A part is different (and the 't' too, of course).

Edit: here's an article about the concept: https://terrianncreative.com/using-ligatures-to-enhance-hand...

That's a neat trick!

I've always wondered how many ligatures would be needed to get a font to look just right? There can be so many permutations...

Edit: that is an amazing website btw, thanks for sharing :)

They're 15, according to the book "The Art of writing" by John Jenkins, from the year 1813 (yes, 1813) according to archive.org. Although In the book there's a text saying it's printed 1818. In the book he lists 15 groups of them and shows two examples for each.

https://archive.org/details/JenkinsArtOfWriting/page/n25/mod...

(page 26 in the built in browser, plate 33 in the book)

> Is there any way to have more glyphs for the same letter and choose one randomly?

Have the human write down not 1 but 50 times the font to be scanned and create 50 fonts.

Then pick one of these 50 fonts at random for each character.

I'd say that'd be the absolute simplest way (although not the most bandwith efficient).

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