Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font

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.

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...

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?

But then I can not read anything anymore. :(

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!)

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...

Text encryption, I like it!

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

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?

That'll be the ugliest font.

Not great for doctors

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.

A wise doctor once typed…

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?

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

What about tildes, accents, cedilles?

á é í ó ú?

new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !

The idea is cool, but, well:

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