I did this in high school (albeit in a much simpler way) by writing every letter on the keyboard on a sheet of paper, scanning it, and using a free program to make a font out of each character.
I calibrated my MS Word settings so that I could print directly onto a sheet of notebook paper, saving me from having to hand-write a bunch of drafts in English class.
How could your teachers not notice that you were clearly using printer ink instead of pen ink or graphite? The materials are pretty easily distinguishable in how they dry and smear.
As someone who has used hand written fonts for Perso-Arabic script, I'm curious how'd you solve problems with cursive writing and letter-form changes (uppercase Vs lowercase in English; Perso-Arabic script has many more nuances).
I absolutely love this idea, but was surprised to see a digital input for handwriting style. I was expecting something along the lines of "take an image of your handwriting and upload it".
Where does the machine learning fit in? First guess is connection between letters but ill have to wait till I'm not at a keyboard to test this out.
I've used this to create a font for an app and it works well, given the effort it asks of you (not much!). It gives you a grid to print and then scrawl each letter. I brought the grid into my iPad, wrote over the top with an Apple Pencil, and then uploaded that. Here's what the grid with my handwriting looks like:
I found it actually quite hard to write exactly between the lines. I used an iPad, like you. When I upload the resulting PDF, it doesn't look great because the letters not on the same horizontal line. I tried to correct them and ran the procedure a second time, but it's going to take, in my estimation, at least an hour to get them just right. Not much for such a great tool, though.
But in general, I find it a bit hard to neatly write on the iPad. It doesn't matter much, I just use it to keep track of notes while programming and designing software. And I can read it myself just fine.
I think it's because the Pencil (version 1) feels more slippery than pen/paper while writing.
The advantage of writing on the iPad though: no more paper.
Yeah, I was hoping to be able to upload an image of my writing to try it out. Trying to work the touchpad or even a digital draw tablet to some extent isn't really an accurate representation.
I've often described my "signature" as "more of a one-time pad than a signature".
I honestly find it shocking that anything in the modern world still considers a signature as any form of authentication whatsoever. (Nobody actually compares the signatures, and yet somehow people see signing as meaningful.)
You are probably thinking of the experience in e.g restaurants in the US.
In our business, we very much do verify signatures. The primary goal is to establish whether the signatures are intended to be the same - not as some kind of forgery detector.
This is very relatable. My handwriting has all kinds of problems. It's like I tried to take all the best parts of cursive and print, and combine them into a perfect in-between style. Unfortunately the result is as far from perfect as I think any handwriting can be.
It looks like a combination between Elvish handwriting and the stuff you can find in the Voynich manuscript, but with all the elegance of Gregg Shorthand. I've somehow developed all kinds of weird habits. For example, beginning all my lines from the top and drawing down, or looping letter tails (like g and y) well beyond the line below them.
My ~90-100 WPM typing speed makes me feel okay about all this though because it's pretty rare that handwriting has much practical application these days.
Interesting; I made the same attempt, but based it off of italics and then got sloppy so that it would look like cursive to a teacher that refused to accept printed homework. All of my lines start from the top, my descenders and ascenders are huge to compensate for the miniscule x-height, and my "f" is an "l" with a "y"-style loop on it. (The "f" started out as a long "s" with a line through it; the line ended up joining up with the bottom of the "s" and then the curve at the top withered away)
It turns out that it looks reasonably nice in a font[1] (except for my horrible keming) because most of the ugliness came from the characters all being irregular.
Unsurprisingly much like all ML things this (presumably) only works well if you're close to the training set. Even writing out pangrams the generated text only looks a little like my handwriting.
I specifically wrote double-decker As and Gs yet the the generated data has single story ones.
I calibrated my MS Word settings so that I could print directly onto a sheet of notebook paper, saving me from having to hand-write a bunch of drafts in English class.