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Comment by ghrl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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