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Thanks for the tips. Will definitely investigate.

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.

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sadly, this was only really possible in Type 3 fonts which were basically 100% postscript interpreted at the glyph level. this made it possible to do things like actually generate a new instance of a glyph each time it was printed at the expense of printing being incredibly costly. If you find interviews where people talk about using beowulf, they all remark how it basically put their printers' cpus to actual work and that files would take forever to output.

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.

> The visual "draft" effect encouraged dialog

That sounds similar to the reasoning behind Balsamiq Mockups and other wire-framing/diagramming tools that look intentionally "crude".

Absolutely. It's something cognitive. The mind is more creative when there's blanks to fill in.

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.

svg might help you there, inkscape has a jitter filter. It creates more vector nodes, but it would display on a webpage and is open format like html

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