Making a font of my handwriting

jlev

I did something similar for my wedding website back in 2013. We used a mail-in service that produced a decent TTF, and then I converted it to a WOFF. Still online at https://ruthandjosh.net/story/ (warning, millennial cringe ahead)

dotancohen

Thank you for that cringe! What a great way to end the week. Shabbat shalom.

aswinmohanme

warmed my heart, wishing you a great life together

kragen

I did this in a much more manual way in 02006: http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/

All the steps I did at the time should still work today, and they may be of some interest if you're trying to do the thing Chris gave up on in "Failing to do it myself", perhaps because you're dissatisfied with the results of the alternative approaches.

password4321

AFAIK Microsoft Font Maker still works (poorly?) for free with Windows Ink styluses. I don't remember what I used decades ago but I think it was a PowerToy for Windows Tablet PC.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n9209f8s3vc?hl=en-US&gl=U...

tombert

My handwriting is exceedingly bad, and it gets worse every time I do it. It's sort of a feedback loop; my handwriting is bad so I type everything, and since I never practice my handwriting it gets bad. I think if someone made a font based on my handwriting it could be used as a cryptographic hash.

I do like the idea of it though; even though I don't think it's less personal to type a message than handwrite it, it feels less personal. Having a font based on handwriting might help with that.

jdranczewski

The description of trying to use FontForge cracked me up, I recall trying it myself a while ago and it going very similarly!

pavel_lishin

I wonder if there's any way to transform this approach taken by Amy Goodchild into actual font files: https://www.amygoodchild.com/blog/cursive-handwriting-in-jav...

Gualdrapo

I'd bet it would be matter of "translating" those Chaikin's paths to Bézier. Then you could generate Metafont fonts from that, and from that you could get ttf, otf and whatnot.

gucci-on-fleek

> Then you could generate Metafont fonts from that, and from that you could get ttf, otf

It's unfortunately not very easy to generate modern TTF/OTF fonts from Metafont sources. If you're careful to not use any crazy pens, you can compile with Metapost and then import the outlines into FontForge, but it's still fairly tricky to make everything work properly.

apparent

They say that you remember more when handwriting than when typing. I believe that. One thing I have wondered about is what if you write on a tablet and then it digitizes your handwriting. Do you still get the same benefit, from the process of having handwritten it?

I would think that part of the value would be in seeing the information written in your own handwriting, which makes me suspect that having a font like this that you could digitize into might be better than writing by hand (whic probably provides some of the memory boost) and then digitizing into a traditional font.

dotancohen

  > One thing I have wondered about is what if you write on a tablet and then it digitizes your handwriting. Do you still get the same benefit, from the process of having handwritten it?

In my experience, you do. I use a Boox E-ink tablet to write on, and I completely concur that just using the stylus to write things commits them to my memory. The things that I've typed, I have to go back and look at.

jkingsman

Perhaps the visual aspect is responsible for a bit, but I know that even notes that I never reviewed after the fact but handwrote had more sticking power in my head than when I typed.

Both my partner and I used tablets for notetaking through college and found it at least analogous if not superior to handwritten notes, since it became easier to link topics that you might otherwise need to back-reference on paper that could instead just be a big arrow. Lots more freedom to use arrows, visual linkages, and asides when you weren't constrained by 8.5x11 paper (which maybe allows a bit of that but otherwise forces linearity, more or less).

mdorazio

For those who were hoping for the physical version of this, I recommend the Stuff Made Here Video on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw

dse1982

When I was a teenager I made a ttf-font from the handwriting of a girl I was in love with as a gift for her. Man I underestimated that task seriously. I used some tool that was included in the Corel Draw Suite, scanned a sheet of paper on which she had written me the alphabet (in upper and in lower case) and vectorized everything by hand. It was so. Much. Work. Since then a quarter of a century has passed and it is one of those stories which leaves me amazed at the amount of naive stubborn energy of youth. I mean it was just for a birthday but I spent so much time on it and most of that time I didn't really know what I was doing. But somehow I succeeded, probably just because I didn't know any better.

snapetom

So what happened with her? Was the effort worth it? Happily ever after?

al_borland

There used to be a form to fill out in Sky Mall to be able to do this through some service. Back in the days where you would fill it out by hand and mail your handwriting to them.

croisillon

Show HN: AI tool to turn handwriting into a font (June 2025, 0 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268487

Coding my handwriting (May 2024, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40408291

... and probably quite a few more!

nartho

>Next, I wanted to change the heading fonts from a monospace font to something cursive

The font created is print, not cursive.

wjrb

Maybe cursive in a "Comic Sans in the default 'cursive' fallback font on Windows" kind of way.

spcebar

At least in the world of web, cursive is a typographic term referring to fonts that aren't sans or sans serif and are typically used for decorative purposes.

pessimizer

I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography. Cursive there afaik mostly means that it has a ton of ligatures.

Fonts that are decorative, when I worked in prepress, were simply called "decorative." It just meant "not for body text" i.e. hard or annoying to read.