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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I love handwriting. As in, I hand-lettered every single one of the hundreds of diagrams in my two books [1]. I am also a sucker for nice pens and fancy paper. Office supply stores are like toy stores for me. (What can I say, I was a teacher's pet growing up.)

So I am 1000% the kind of person to get into fountain pens.

But I'm also a lefty. :(

I know it is possible to learn to use a fountain pen while writing left-handed, but it's a serious uphill battle and is never as easy and natural as being right-handed. Every now and then, I'm tempted to learn to write mirrored.

[1]: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...

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Ooof, yeah, left handed with a fountain pen is not easy. I once foolishly went left handed "just to try" and ended up with a beautiful shade of dark green ink all over my palm and wrist. The ink just doesn't dry fast enough, even with premium papers. Maybe there are new inks that work well for this?

It sounds like you've found some other pens that work well for you if you managed to hand draw hundreds of diagrams. I do feel sad you won't be able to fully experience "the glide" you get from fountain pens though. It's a real treat.

(also, side note, thanks for writing Game Programming Patterns, Crafting Interpreters, they are excellent books!)

> It sounds like you've found some other pens that work well for you if you managed to hand draw hundreds of diagrams.

Yes! Technical pens are great. My first book was all done using a Faber-Castell Pitt pen and my second book was Pigma Microns. I think Pitt pens are my favorite. I also have some Copic Multiliners which I was very excited about but ended up being a little too narrow for my taste.

Ah, yeah, I prefer the Faber-Castell Pitt's with the fine point to the Microns as well. The Microns do seem to be easier to find here in my end of Canada though, so there are tons in the house and my wife enjoys them as well.

Have you tried the FC Pitt brush pens [0] at all? They seem like a lot of fun for diagrams and doodles.

[0] https://fabercastellshopcanada.ca/collections/pitt-artist-pe...

Yeah, I have a couple. They're OK, but brush pens are hard for a lefty because the strokes that should be pulled and align with the direction of the brush don't always work that way when writing left handed. Probably fun for drawing though.

You don't really have to learn it, a couple minutes of concerted effort will get you most of the way there

When I first started I'd say I was up to my normal speed within about half a page of Freeform journaling, initially it took conscious effort but then the brain just kinda went "oh."

Tangent: after that first day I had the thought to hold the resulting pages up to a mirror. The backwards writing was disconcertingly neater than my regular. (And remained that way even as I got faster and lazier)

Also for some unknown reason I formed the lowercase "A" entirely differently - everything else was the same..

Brains are weird.

I remember the diagrams in Crafting Interpreters and thinking what a great application of hand-done diagrams it was. So glad you did them that way.

Also left handed, BTW. If you're ever interested in going it even more old-school -- dip pens with India or Sumi ink are the absolute bomb. The ink is blacker than anything I've seen except perhaps in intaglio/etchings -- it can be made darker than fountain pen ink because there is no fear of clogging. Yeah, there's a bit of cleanup after every use, but very satisfying too, for some use cases.

Not a fountain pen, but the LAMY Safari (Rollerball) and Zebra Sarasa Dry (Gel) pens will each dry fast enough to write left-handed with most papers.

I find the typical rollerball to be far more conducive to cursive writing than a ball-point, as very little pressure is needed to release the ink. Kind of a "fountain-pen lite"

I am an Urdu speaker, which is written RTL. Right-handed people never have any trouble writing Urdu, but left-handed people struggle to write Urdu. I don't exactly know why.

When I read the second sentence, I suspected it was you, and then it was confirmed by your username :)

Those diagrams are beautiful, and I think anyone who picks up that book and holds it in their hand can appreciate the work that went into it.

Thank you for creating it!

Try an ink formulated for drying quickly:

https://noodlersink.com/product-tag/fast-drying/

Unrelated, but thanks for your book. The illustrations are lovely and carefully crafted; I’d wondered how you made them.

You're welcome! People always assume I drew them digitally somehow, but nope, literally on paper with pencil and pen. Here's a video I put together showing the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN1MsCXkPSA

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