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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I am really confused about the point of joining letters not matching up. The whole point of cursive to me is that you do not take your pen off the paper, so the way to join letters is built in. Author seems to have had issues because she’s not actually writing that way?

That said, I really enjoy the whole rest of this writeup for just being the simplest possible way you can go about drawing a bunch of letters on screen without messing with fonts :)

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> The whole point of cursive to me is that you do not take your pen off the paper, so the way to join letters is built in.

This is both correct in the way you word it here, and, incorrect regarding your interpretation. The connection between letters in cursive is context-dependent. A “b” followed by an “a” or an “o” will likely have variations since it improves the readability of what you write. Similarly there are times where you might not want to keep the pen on the paper between letters within a word, which doesn’t break the “rules” of cursive.

You may have been taught differently and maybe your teachings were correct. I’m not aware of any form of cursive where connections are not supposed to be context-dependent though.

The point, which the author discusses at length, seems to be that different letter pairs match up in different ways, which needs to be accounted for.

I'm wondering if cursive has been taught differently over the last few decades -- I was taught in the 70s, and at that time the instruction was that letters always start and end at the same point. That instruction clearly does not match up to the article or some comments, but rather than quibbling over which of us is correct, I'm more curious how the teaching may have changed over the years?

Yes, there are lots of different styles of cursive that have been taught at various times and places over the last 100 years

there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaner-Bloser_(teaching_script) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian

probably more.

For an extra data point, I was taught in 1995.

Zaner-Bloser looks the closest to what I was taught, but is not a perfect match.

I think I suffer from ‘what I was taught is correct’ syndrome. Of course multiple ways can be correct, but it certainly does address the ‘not matching up’ point

In the 90s, I learned D'Nealian cursive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian

No they don’t. At least in my cursive writing. Line from end of last letter to beginning of next letter is always correct, since you don’t take your pen off the paper. That’s not different between the code and the reality.

If your letters look wrong it’s because you are starting them in the wrong place. Or because you take your pen off the paper. Letters either end in the bottom right or top right, and begin in the upper left. A straight line should always be correct.

The issue with the a that looks like an e is because the author is trying to start writing her a on the left side of the character.

Obviously the letters connect, but where a given letter ends depends on the following letter, and where a given letter starts depends on the previous letter.

For example, in standard American cursive, b, o, v, and w have a top exit stroke, whereas the rest of the lowercase letters finish on the writing line. Combine this with the letter a, which has a top entry stroke, so the oa will join at the top, whereas ea will join from bottom to top.

I don’t see how this matters? They’re splines right? Just quickly writing those down I see a very minor variation in how they connect, but ultimately that variance’d be hardly noticable.

Regardless, the end of the o or e, to the beginning of a is still a straight line.

The article gives explicit examples of where just connecting them with a straight line does not look right, and is noticeable.

Absolutely, and that’s how I can see that it has more to do with the form of the letter than the fact that joining without adjustment is impossible.

Anyhow, I doubt we’re going to convince each other here. Since the tool is right there I might just give it a try.

At this point I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about :)

Interesting. In the 90s in Germany I learned that for some letters you lift the pen, even though the result will look connected, e.g. "ac" would lift after the a, draw the c leftwards, touching the end of the a and then swing around to the next letter, kinda like this, but leaving no gap between the letters: /C

Also, t would be disconnected with itself, being written like /| followed by a - overlapping the |

every pair of letters join in a different way

it's similar to kerning with even non-joining fonts, you need to encode how various sequences of letters appear

Is it possible to encode (in some existing program) for letter pairs where each code point is the right-hand side of the first letter of the pair plus the left-hand side of the second letter in the pair ?

I ask because upper-case Finnish has lots of really gnarly whitespace/kerning issues. Letter pairs like LJ and KY and YT and VY that could get special attention, even stroke joining, in a font such as I describe.

So a fragment like " KEVYT." could be encoded as (spc + lh-K), (rh-K + lh-E), (rh-E + lh-V), (rh-V + lh-Y), (rh-Y + lh-T), (rh-T + period).

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