FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font | Hacker News Reader

FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

arcade.pirillo.com

482 pointsrendx157 comments

There used to be multiple tools like this from different websites, but they were all bought by Calligraphr to redirect to them instead, giving them an effective monopoly and letting them charge subscription fees for generating fonts over the limits of the free version. I used to create two fonts and merge them with FontForge to get a complete usable font.

Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.

Ah, the Overleaf model.

Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.

Seems like open source is the way to defeat this. Anyone can easily create a competing service, which they then have to buy out, but the cost of setting up a new one is minimal. Interesting business model that feeds on anti-competitive businesses.

Interestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak to how well the open source version works.

[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

IIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.

You'd think this should encourage people to build carbon-copies of the tools that have been bought out in the hope of being bought out... It's only a sustainable model if it's fringe enough and with low enough purchase amounts to not eventually become an exit strategy for people who might not even have tried otherwise.

I mean there is a solution to this

"Can I buy your company?"

"No."

The competition to Overleaf is just running LaTeX locally, which costs approximately zero dollars and it's faster! But it's a little less convenient for a solo author, and a lot less convenient for a collaboration.

I'm guessing that if you just uploaded a few pages of handwritten text to ChatGPT and asked it to make a font of your handwriting it would do a passably decent job. That might be the way that this business model ends.

If only my handwriting weren't utter chicken scratch I'd use this, but in my case - nobody needs to see that. :-/

You can use a picture of anyone's handwriting. There's high res pictures of medieval monks handwriting and so on that probably would be really cool as fonts.

Your comment inspired me--I have an autograph book from the 1800s, my great-great-grandmother's.

The kids back then would sign notes to each other in these books, in lieu of a yearbook.

The handwriting is absolutely stunning. I have to do this now.

I’m interested in this, please share when you’re done!

No need for encryption if no-one can read you ;)

I'm in the same boat haha

Dr. Kumar?

There's very good OCR models. Then it becomes a matter of which letter is which. In Latin script there's only 26 possibilities, and then there's numbers and symbols.

1) https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3

not as simple as just OCR and map though. Some letters want space above them some want to be placed lower.

take g and f and c for examples

g and f are about the same height but different ofsets, and c would look like a capital C if scaled to the same size as g and f. (we probably want to auto adjust scales to match more evenly unless the text is on a grid (in case removing the grid is the difficulty)

These are just the difficulty I found by trying to make a more automated input to fontforge.

There are ligatures as well if you’re getting fancy

Mistral OCR is OCR combined with LLM. In English, it as simple as 'just good OCR' though. Check the example on the webpage I linked. The screenshot doesn't show perfect handwriting. The (invisible) line also doesn't go straight.

FTA:

> Handwriting: Mistral OCR accurately interprets cursive, mixed-content annotations, and handwritten text layered over printed forms.

> Forms: Improved detection of boxes, labels, handwritten entries, and dense layouts. Works well on invoices, receipts, compliance forms, government documents, and such.

> Scanned & complex documents: Significantly more robust to compression artifacts, skew, distortion, low DPI, and background noise.

> Complex tables: Reconstructs table structures with headers, merged cells, multi-row blocks, and column hierarchies. Outputs HTML table tags with colspan/rowspan to fully preserve layout.

A related but different approach I liked was taken by Amy Goodchild, who is an artist that uses code for her creations.

She encoded her handwriting as paths in JS (rather than as a font): https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...

This is really cool, educative and very well written.

Awesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin

Yes, I thought something which could make my handwriting more like a font would be useful.

I have long theorized that it is inscrutable for a reason: as a bar to laypeople reading a/o editing prescriptions.

Turning "30 pills of Pennicillin, refill 0 times" into "30 pills of OxyContin, refill 3 times" is much harder when you can't even figure out which part is the drug name.

(Kids who are about to point out this couldn't work: Prescriptions used to be hand-written on paper, and never checked by the then-inexistent interwebs.)

I know of someone who was let go from an employer when they contacted the doctor’s office whose stationary was used on the employee's many absence excuse notes. It turned out they were a gerontology office. The employee was in their early twenties.

Controlling access to stationary, prescription pads, and the office’s fax machine is one part. Making it hard to forge the doctor’s handwriting is another.

My 3rd grade teacher wrote something like this regarding my handwriting in my final report card:

We've done all we can for toast0. But he'll have a secretary so it'll be fine

I never did get to have a secretary, but thanks to COVID learning losses, I do manage to have a lot better penmanship than about half of kids going into high school this year. :)

We had a science teacher in 7th grade whose teaching style was all overhead notes. She'd give us time to copy them into our spiral bounds or 3-rings and when we were all done, she'd swap for the next slide.

She didn't lecture but she did tell stories about her farm, hunting, and occasionally some science. We could ask questions and tell stories if we finished copying the notes before everyone else was done. So, one of the takeaways from her class was getting very efficient and neat with my writing. I tried to write in a clean all caps and eventually learned which strokes were best for speed and spacing. I still use that hand-font and I always think of her sitting on the wall radiator laughing through some story of trying to fix a bad situation.

I never did get my pen license—they insisted on the dynamic tripod grasp, which I never could cope with (I prefer lateral quadrupod). So I and one other had to keep using pencils until the end of grade four, after which point they forgot about the matter.

My elder brother had (simplifying the story a lot) such bad handwriting that they let him type his year 12 exams, turning a possible disadvantage into a frankly unfair advantage, especially in English, where being able to output four times as fast is valuable. Wish I could have done that.

Turning my handwriting into a font is akin to encrypt the text :-D

Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time.

Right!? My mind teleported back to the TechTV era for a second.

LockerGnome!

I saw pirillo.com and thought 'it's got to be him'.

OMG Yes! Dating ourselves aren't we? Pirillo, Laporte, Dvorak - awesome folks from Tech TV

i used to date myself but had to buy myself dinner

MobilePhone2003? or was it 2006?

i'm not quite dead

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.

I think that might be generational. I don’t know anyone under 40 who writes in cursive. I certainly don’t.

It is probably country and language dependent, I think. I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian), and for other languages I personally also write in cursive (and learnt that in school). I'm in my 30s.

> I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...

Understandable.

OP double negated - cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.

There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.

> cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

I know. I always feel utterly embarrassed when Russian-speaking friends write down a movie title for me, and I have to ask them to rewrite it in block capitals.

That's a good one, I must admit.

FWIW, Serbian Cyrillic cursive does not have that issue, or at least not as bad: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/%D...

It's more cultural than generational.

It's both. In the US, schools are turning away from teaching cursive, which clearly makes a generational cut.

My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.

Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.

That's not generational. Living in France I can ensure you that in primary school, kids still learn and use cursive as main writing system. I wasn't even aware anyone would use anything else to write by hand in Latin script.

I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.

Yeah, no idea how print became handwriting and handwriting longhand/cursive, but that's how it is and has been for decades in the USA.

As for Germany, as far as I know only few states still teach cursive: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift

The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift

Went through school in the early 2000s in US. We were taught cursive (script), but I don't think I've used it since school.

Seems odd, in hindsight, to teach hand-written prose uses a different set of symbols than when its typed out

How fast can you write in cursive vs non-cursive? I am much slower in non-cursive when writing.

The only issue is that my cursive is pretty lousy looking.

I'd hedge to say roughly the same, but that's writing print in chicken-scratch handwriting (which is my norm) and under-practiced with cursive. I'd suspect after using cursive a bit I would speed up. Similar to using home-row when typing vs pick-and-peck or whatever they call it

My phone would transcribe even quicker than that, though, which would probably be my go-to instead of hand-writing

In the US, when I was in grade school we learned both, but almost all the kids chose to write in Latin script when given the option. I think we learned that first and it just stuck.

One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.

My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.

I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian (cursive and print examples are here)

The word "generation" commonly refers to year of birth and cultural context (e.g. geographical location). So yes, it is generational

Still taught in uk primary schools as the fastest way to get words down in paper

Makes me wonder whether there are diction tests (I feared/hated those with a passion) in the USA?

Never even heard that term before. So: no.

Too late to edit, 'dictation' was meant. Seems I still suck at spelling ;-/

Still no :)

Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.

i'm in the UK and most people i know drop cursive for non-joined up handwriting as soon as they get the opportunity.

My daughter simply cannot write without joining the letters, finds it impossible. Time will tell if this remains true. Everyone is different in the best possible way.

>how I and most people I know write.

I do not know a single person who writes any cursive outside their signature.

My experience was a bit of a disaster.

It's worth noting that it's only at the end that it turns out you have 3 options for using the rows (you can't say use row 1&2 caps but row 3 lowercase)

For whatever reason it really struggled to detect the cross hairs. It thought the top right cross hair was the O.

I had intensely compress the black white range to make it detect at all.

What should it look like btw?

Also even though it detected A thru F great it kind of fell to pieces down the page suggesting that the registration isn't good enough to detect each block. Maybe let people mark the cross hairs manually?

More registration marks and ones that are more distinct than cross hairs would likely help. I used a high quality scan! So registration should have been muche asier than a photo.

I don't really know what's wrong!

The website does say that it was ‘vibe coded’[0] so perhaps the author didn’t test it very thoroughly? They apparently do ‘vibe coding’ courses so.. that’s something.

[0] https://arcade.pirillo.com/

It's really impressive for what it is.

I tried it various pens and paper sizes and printer scales. And it suddenly worked but only if scanned at low res (200DPI).

Still I got a partially working font at the end

For sure! I was so surprised to see that this was done all in browser. I mean there’s no reason that shouldn’t be possible in 2026 considering there’s services that do this server side, but still it’s always impressive when something like this comes along.

It's not a course.

What I do is free and intended to be workshops for non-technical users to understand the power of technology rather than slamming it in their face.

ugh. i came to see why this site failed completely to work as expected. turns out that a human has barely been anywhere near it and thinks that delivering non-working slop is fine. what a waste of my time and printer paper.

Try it again. Made some beefy updates earlier today to catch outliers.

Yes seems to be working well now!

I really wanted to make this work with my daughter. She's 9yo, and she filled out the form, and we scanned it with a real scanner. I'll admit we didn't have a felt tip pen, but we did have a grea black ink gell pen.

But something about the way the app applied the threshold on the scanned image, made the letters really broken. Maybe having a thicker pen would be the solution.

Try it again. Fixed quite a few bugs today.

Run it through a dilate filter a few times.

Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.

Same here. The characters need to move higher. They look like I wrote them below the baseline... :(

Try again? Same template should work (with current fixes in place).

Please, try again. I pushed a few fixes out this afternoon.

Personally, I like that my handwriting has tiny inconsistencies in every character and rarely-repeated flourishes.

I don't want to manufacture something that looks like it, but loses the soul of it.

Coming Soon: Make multiple fonts of your handwriting samples, and have a robot interlace them pseudorandomly!

I agree. I make adjustments depending on which parts of the page I'm on and what I'm writing. This is a nice project but I'm not sure id want to use it for anything.

I used something like this tool to create 10 different fonts of my handwriting. Then I wrote scripts to randomize which font was used for each character, ensuring that no word had that same variant of a single letter. It worked incredibly well for a personalized printed mail campaign. It really did look hand written.

edit: basically what DANmode replied to the same parent. I did this 10 years ago while running for political office.

I remember there was a service that would do this by mail in the 90s. You had to fill out a card with each block letter and then it cost a few hundred dollars. I wasn't even a teenager then so I couldn't afford it, but I always wanted to do it.

Well now I’m curious how they did it in the 90s. Some poor schmo doing pixel by pixel font creation?

Vector tracing was a thing way back, and from there, it was probably some simple programming to make a font out of a number of vector glyph images.

I've used iFontMaker for this on the iPad - quite amusing to be able to select my own monospaced font for terminals (even if it is just "old man traced over Courier Prime badly".)

Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.

Tangentially related: anyone has suggestions on an "automated" way to "print" pages with a typewriter? If you want to have papers that "look" as typed with a typewriter, as opposed to printed with laser printers and such.

Teletype machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter

This is what a teletype is: it's a typewriter with a serial connection. You send bytes over the serial cable and it types them.

Only tangentially related, but this is a good research starting point: https://www.gt-pressura.com/

You want a daisy wheel printer[1] I think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing

Add this to your list if things you try: https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/02/a-hyperrealistic-typewrit...

Article links right to the font.

This is cool, but when viewed up close, laser-printed letters still lack the fuzzy edges and imprinted texture of letters created by typewriter slugs.

Indeed

If you also want a thing to do typewriting on, later-model word processors (e.g., Smith Corona PWP series) tend to have a feature that auto-types text entered and edited earlier. It'll have the imprinting insofar as the type impacts the paper, but it's not going to have the off-center / over-inked / patchy manual typewriter look. For that you may just want to find a font face that replicates it.

The instructions say that rows 2 and 3 in the template can be either lower or upper case. How does the website determine the case in those rows? Does it simply check if row 1 looks different from the other rows?

You configure that in the Configuration section. ;)

I can't speak to the service in the headline, but I used a service at least 10 years ago and brought it to a family party to show off. I thought it was a cool thing to do so we all filled out the alphabet/number/symbol sheets I printed out and made a bunch of fonts for family members. Didn't think much of it, the novelty faded, but then people started getting old and dying.

Now I have little snippets of history and unique handwriting, albeit simplistic and imperfect, that remind me of my loved ones passed in a unique way.

Not sure it would work in my case. I do love to take the very different freedom it brings. For example the mid bars of a t is often taken as an opportunity to go through above the whole word. But I wouldn't do it every single time, as it would feel too much overload.

I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.

Had to dig to find this but back in 2009 I was bored so I made a font based of my handwriting. I had a Wacom tablet and used this font creator- I'm pretty sure it was called Fontographer. Anyways it's still floating around the Internet: https://fontmeme.com/fonts/mattfont-font/

I did this 20 years ago when I bought a convertible tablet with a stylus.

It was the first touchscreen I'd ever owned, and ran a special Tablet edition of XP. If I recall, it came with something similar to Microsoft Font Maker. On a roadtrip, a friend of mine scrawled in all the letters and presto, we had a new handwritten font.

The script looked kind of like a kid's handwriting. Over the years I used it (with permission) in various PDF's and doc files, mainly when I was showcasing how to fill in a form. It lent a nice, obvious distinction between the phrases that were part of the form template, and the portions that had been "handwritten" in. The last time I used it was to train volunteer firefighters how to fill in certain medical paperwork and equipment inspection logs.

Hey, cool, that's using my library: https://opentype.js.org/

It's nice to see it pop up in so many places!

So VERY grateful!

30 years ago there were ads in SkyMall for a service that did this. I always really wanted to do it as a kid. That desire has faded over time, but those ads really stuck in my mind.

A sign of how irrelevant handwriting became is that there are no popular AI models that aim at cloning it, even though it should be fairly easy.

I'm dysgraphic with a small essential tremor, and often write in a hybrid between cursive & block gothic. I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them for each letter to look like my handwriting.

My drafting lettering is OK. But it's much, much slower & requires a straightedge, multiple thickness pencils, an eraser shield, and an eraser.

> I'd need to make a few dozen different fonts & have it randomly pick between them

I took this approach once and enjoyed the result. I filled out 10 copies of the template of a handwriting font generator and generated all 10 fonts. Then I wrote a python script to process a libreoffice document. If it saw the 'handwriting1' style anywhere in the document it would pseudorandomly alternate between fonts. Since uncanny resemblance of two adjacent letter is the biggest giveaway that a handwriting font is at play, I made sure my script would change the font within a word if there were two adjacent 'T' or 'S' characters.

I've since lost the code (it wasn't something I needed to often use) but with LLMs these days I'm sure I'd be inclined to build something better -- for instance, performing the randomization within a single font file, and using custom glyphs for adjacent 't' characters that might have a common crossbar, improved support for other languages I use, or rendering a particular case of my legal name as a signature.

Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?

Asking the right questions

Ironically, that's exactly what calligraphy is.

And learning to write in 'fonts' (hands) like block-print is still a form of calligraphy.

Odd that so many commenters see to be declaring proudly or ruefully that their handwriting is bad, and ‘no one wants it’ or ‘the world doesn’t need to see it’ or similar…

It’s your handwriting, why be so judgemental after all?

I did this years ago with a site whose name I can't recall. I still use the results for certain things, but it's certainly not a font you can use for everything.

Okay this is reaching me like 30 years later.

My current one I don't like it as much as the one I used to have. That old one would turn into a font and feel cool.

Worked good for me scanning with the Google drive app and "enhancing" the scan. Typing out my own handwriting is a really neat experience!

This is cool. I'd like to see an example of a filled-out template that generated a decent font. I think that'd be helpful.

This is cool, but my handwriting is illegible so only a handful of people would be able to read it. Love the idea, though.

I write in cursive. Does this work for that?

My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)

My hand writing is so bad(2)

Wow. :D

Thanks for picking this up! More to come. I'm working on adding color support right now.

fun tool! last month, i built a similar one but with focus on drawing directly on mobile. no need to print pages. open source!

https://handofyou.app

Text encryption, I like it!

Well I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it

The last thing this world needs is my handwriting spreading beyond my local community!

But I would have loved to use this to capture my kid's kindergarten handwriting. Maybe I still have a sample around here...

Amazing way to show-case a tool (all in-browser, can be done so simply), super disappointed in the result. I took care writing all the letters, but when I looked at the generated font, even some of the corner markers ended up as letters!?

Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?

I guess it's cause cursive is no longer a thing in the US..

Nor spelling and punctuation?

Please try again? I fixed a couple of snags. Use your same template?

But then I can not read anything anymore. :(

As a calligrapher, I appreciate this.

\o/

That'll be the ugliest font.

this is actually quite good. wasn't expecting it to be that accurate.

A wise doctor once typed…

Not great for doctors

This works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.

People write in cursive all the time. You mainly sign in cursive.

Kids are being taught cursive again. Texas has been doing it again for awhile.

No idea why they stopped teaching it for a few years, kind of messed those kids up.

How do people have a signature if they don't know cursive?

Do they just print it twice lol?

I agree with your statement, and cursive has extra benefits like leading to better hand strength and so on but outside of that, signatures aren't a good counter argument.

Signatures aren't cursive, they're a curated, custom art piece.

Arguably even signatures are being replaced with digital agreements. Just click "I Agree [and we'll use other proof than the squiggly that it was you because your digital squiggly is uselessly different every time]".

Arguing that something is good because Texas is doing it is ultimately a self defeating argument that reveals a lot about you (as do the other internet incel horseshit and exuberant defenses of Scott Adams' racism and misogyny you post). Do you mean systematic institutionalized racism, rampant gun violence, and frequent school shootings are good too?

It's not good "because Texas is doing it".

Never said that, learn to read.

All schools were doing it until several years ago.

But noone can even read now so moot point...

This look cool.

Meo

What about tildes, accents, cedilles?

á é í ó ú?

auto generated. ;)

new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !

I hereby declare I''ll be unfit for school next Friday due to an illness.

Signed, Mom

I HEREBY DECLARE I' LL BE UNFIT FOR SCHOOL NE XT FRIDAY DUE TO AN ILLnESS .

S I G N E D , M O M

The idea is cool, but, well:

"No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."

sound great

Are you implying that the lack of data harvesting is a disadvantage?

It not a disadvantage but a rare trait nowadays.

well makes sense if JavaScript is run 100% locally.

Browser can be treated as loader of code to be executed only locally with Local only data.

i hate js, but it's doable

Your post makes it sound like you consider this a bad thing?

I don’t see the downside here.

If you don’t believe it, maybe disconnect from network before dropping the file?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com