Create a font from your own handwriting
myscriptfont.com
myscriptfont.com
Edit: Seems like they have a new version of the tool on PaintFont.com which does have support for ligatures!
Edit2: Just tried it in my lunch break. Worked perfectly :) Doesn't look much like my real handwriting due to the uniform spacing, but definitely fun to use.
Two contemporary examples: Bello Script[1] and Trixie HD, although lots of people are really pushing opentype's features these days in novel ways.
[0]: http://letterror.com/fontcatalog/fontfont-beowolf/
[1]: http://www.underware.nl/fonts/bello/features/how_does_it_wor...
Oh, that's cool, that's the handiwork of Guido van Rossum's brother:
A buddy of mind wrote HandPlot for AutoCAD (way back in the day). It'd jitter the HPGL/2 output to mimic a drafter's pen drawn technique. The visual "draft" effect encouraged dialog, whereas the precision of normal plots shutdown discussion. (Looks like it's now a built in feature called Visual Styles, hmmm).
I've always wanted to do the same for hand lettering. Any one who's done drafting on the boards knows what I'm talking about. People used to take great pride in their unique lettering. Somehow parlaying that into one's design/contract drawings would be awesome.
I looked at PostScript and TrueType, but couldn't figure out how to randomize the letter forms. I never looked at OpenType.
opentype only allows for simple substitutions, but in many cases, those seem to do the trick if you programmatically generate a substitution map based on a target language's corpus. i think there's a robofont or typecon session where they talk about this and the practical limitations of how many gsubs most opentype engines can deal with before they stop altogether. very cool stuff and mega-niche, but it's cool to see how people play with constraints.
That sounds similar to the reasoning behind Balsamiq Mockups and other wire-framing/diagramming tools that look intentionally "crude".
I played around a bit to see if I could style HTML+CSS to look sketch / toon / hand drawn. Precisely what I thought Balsamiq was doing. Wouldn't that be awesome?
Alas, I didn't get very far. I chopped a hand drawn box into 9 GIFs (upper left, upper middle, upper right, ... lower right) and attached them to a DIV. A lot of work. And the long edges could only be stretched, vs repeated. And I couldn't fathom a way to "owner draw" (old Win32 dev here, sorry) other widgets like dropdowns and scrollbars.
If there was a way to access each widget's vectors, then a hand drawn style is totally feasible.
Perhaps once zoomable UIs become common place.
Here's the basic algorithm:
1. Generate two maps of low frequency noise. Perlin noise would probably work well, but just blurred noise will do. If we're thinking in terms of blurring, the radius should be on the order of x-height/2. Call that scale "S". One map is for X and one is for Y.
2. Convert the text to Bézier curves.
3. Process those curves, subdividing any long curve segments until they are no longer than S.
4. Now, process the curves again, and for each point, look up the corresponding point in your two maps. Displace the point's position according to the map value, with maximum distance somewhere on the order of S/4.
5. Render the new curves.
The parameters would need to be tweaked (I'm reporting them from vague memory), but that basic outline can provide surprisingly convincing results when applied to a handwriting font. Note that I did not mention what order of Bézier curve to use. You can get good results even by converting to polygons, but the segment length will need to be shorter.
A few practice lines of zigs and zags and vertical dashes and C shapes makes a big difference.
I learned to write pretty much by myself after my parents taught me to read and I didn't practice the m's and the o's exercises in 1st class (since I already _could_ write). This ended up in a horrible handwriting, which a lot of teachers criticized without offering any solution.
At the age of 14 I received an old metal dip-pen and I loved it but I didn't like the outcome, so... I started practicing, writing alphabets, letters, words, sentences, just for the pleasure of using the pen and finding the right shape for each letter. It is still a work in process though as I sometimes change the way I shape one or another letter and I still from time to time write down a couple alphabets.
I'm not claiming my handwriting is now fabulous, far from that, but I'm at least not ashamed of it and would gladly use it as a font (where appropriate).
<- Tired of attempting to read other's scrawl
Anyway LaTeX has beautiful fonts, so I wouldn't worry too much about it yet.
Why, then, would anybody use anything other than a ballpoint? For me the writing experience is smoother with a good nib pen on decent paper, and I hate cheap paper anyway. Even good ballpoints aren't great here; the only exception I've ever seen are these ceramic tipped ones: http://www.leevalley.com/US/gifts/page.aspx?p=70130&cat=4,53... As a result of poor-to-mediocre ability to write, my cursive degenerated terribly for years, becoming a terrible illiterate scrawl that even I couldn't read. After I started playing about with fountain pens, I discovered that it was actually a legitimate way of writing, and faster than printing everything everywhere.
1. Get rid of weird Select/Upload tabs. Put Upload button at the end of the page.
2. Much less instructions, nobody reads them.
3. Make character table hidden by default (with an option to show it).
4. Change "Create template(s)" button to "Download Template".
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4071117/uri-starting-with...
Also, this is just a minor suggestion, but I would love to be able to map a non-standard character (such as the copyright symbol) to my signature.
The big problem I had with my font was that some characters were quite bigger or smaller than others, despite it "fitting" into the same size box. I wonder if they managed to fix that some how
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote-help/powertoys-for...
> This PowerToy for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition converts your
> own handwriting into a TrueType font.I would be really impressed if the template consisted of a set of phrases you had to transcribe, and then it asked you to confirm the letter choices if there is doubt, and created composites where there are more than one of the same letter in the sample.
I don't know how this can be solved in the general case. Maybe add 10 free letters and ask the user to supply the unicode number, or type/copy the letter in a text field of the web page.
EDIT: My apoligies, that was http://www.yourfonts.com/ . I'll have to try this one out I've always wanted to.
Would be fun to use that's for sure. :D
PS: Helps copy pasting in those assignments
Anyway if he ever saw my handwriting he would change is policy - it actively scares people.
Though I don't get why you would want to, I have seen far more beautiful handwritting elsewhere (it is certainly prettier than mine, but that isn't saying something).