I've always wondered if that's possible: a font file where if you type the letter 'A' for example, one of five versions of the letter 'A' is chosen. And so on for other letters so that a bit of randomness is imparted to the "writing".
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.