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)
Kudos to you and the journey. I appreciate your honesty honestly about giving up on open source alternative for a quite cheap alternative for something you get to keep as your own is not a bad tradeoff.
Your story resonates. I am a self-taught creative and I get stubborn at times about wanting to use/bend a specific technology/tool to achieve a task; maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy OCD thing.
Your site design has character.
PS: Bookmarked your site with the tags - fonts, developer-blog, creative-sites, boutique-designs... on my firefox browser.
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.
the whole "there are easier ways to do things so i never develop a skillset" is a big problem nowadays, imo. There are always easier ways to do stuff but in the long run they aren't the better way to do something because you wind up learning a system instead of how to do something.
i'll use my roommate as an example. Dude uses a knife sharpener system but can't actually sharpen a knife with a stone. The second his system doesn't work he can't actually sharpen a knife. All he knows is how to use the system. I see this in a lot of people nowadays. They know how to follow some instructions but the connections to why are never made.
As a society our basic skillsets are extremely atrophied because capitalism has turned everything into a pay-to-save-time system, or something.
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.
This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I am currently preparing for a workshop with children in which I want to let them “draw” their own website/web-apps. So far I did not plan to let them create their own fonts, as I did not know how to, but now I know. Thanks to you!
Ps: if you have any other ideas how to make such a workshop for children more exciting, please let me know! For instance, I wanted to let them create paper prototypes and then turn them into working click dummies so to cross the bridge between analogue and digital in way that feels natural to kids. Btw, by “kids” I refer to children at the age of 8-10 years old.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I did this for my old blog back in the 2000s - I used an online service that produced a pretty bad font that I could clean up using FontForge into something reasonable. It was a fun novelty but my penmanship is pretty bad and once in a while I would get flamed in the comments in my own handwriting.
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.
> They say that you remember more when handwriting than when typing
I believe that too.
Writing is one of my tools for taming my ADHD tendencies. I have journals of different sizes and when I am in the zone, I capture the moment in my own words and in my own way. I draw lines and art on my notes and just scanning a few lines on another day instantly immerses me back in the moment when the ideas/words/thought hit me.
For those who type better than they write, I don't see any reason to not do that, even though for me, it's pen on paper.
We're all different and I am a strong believer of the idiom that goes "One man's food..."
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).
> 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.
This is not a humble brag by any means, just sharing my experience
I type 121 wpm and I simply can’t concentrate when writing by hand
It’s too slow and instead of focusing on formulating my thoughts or capturing what’s being said I get super fidgety
Not to mention my handwriting stinks
For me it’s a lot easier to remember when I’m fully immersed and processing ideas vs tediously writing
I do think this is probably just lack of handwriting skill - I definitely learned all this in school and took handwritten notes most of my life, but I suspect I never did it right back then
> It’s too slow and instead of focusing on formulating my thoughts or capturing what’s being said
AFAIU, if you're trying to take notes capturing what was said in a conversation between people.. to some extent you're going to need to focus and summarize anyway.
For handwriting notes for your own work.. I think writing stimulates & catalyses thought.
If you're in the flow, it doesn't make sense to stop and write notes. (Other than maybe so as to dispatch distracting thoughts, to preserve flow, or to enable flow for later).
If you're not flowing.. IME writing notes can help draw out thoughts: identify what it is you're confused or unclear about, what doesn't make sense, or what needs to be prioritised. -- For some reason, I've found pen & paper (especially 4-5 colours) to be more effective than just using a keyboard.
Your comment had me wondering how quick various systems are for writing. Shorthand can apparently get comfortably over 200wpm, but the bit that is I found wild is is how it looks.
Your handwriting skills are due to lack of practice. You weren't born typing at 121wpm.
I prefer typing for anything longer than a few words. But I can't type a picture (despite things like Mermaid and PlantUML) being useful.
I make extensive use of paper (and whiteboards if I'm sharing) for making pictures, mostly graph-like things such as flow diagrams, sequences, ERD etc. I feel somewhat "disabled" if I'm forced to just screen technology to do it (although Excalidraw is pretty good).
What a bummer the website https://www.calligraphr.com is a subscription model. I could impulsively pay $100 to get my handwriting as a TTF font and be quite happy about it.
TFA goes into this in some depth: there's an option to subscribe for one month with a one-time payment. After the month is up, your account automatically reverts to the free plan and you get an email with your fonts attached.
The subscription is only for backups and ongoing changes - you get to keep your font forever. I think the author mentions that the whole experience cost them about $10
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.
I always thought this was such a cool idea to preserve the handwriting style of someone you love (I adore my partner's handwriting), but the conversion to a font never seems to keep the spacing right, as you show in the final comparison.
I've been thinking of tinkering with an image to image generation model to convert text output from the font into something that looks closer to the handwritten version. Seems like it should be possible, but you need a lot of data.
There was retail boxed software that would do this on Windows 95 that included worksheets and software. You'd write examples in each square of the worksheet that you would then scan in and convert to TTF with their proprietary software.
I would say it seems like a simple enough task for a weekend project but I know better.
Honestly, this idea is intriguing enought that I might actually pay for a month of that service. I'm willing to make that my first software purchase because I want to support symbiotic business practices like the one described (as opposed to adversarial rent-seeking ones seen all too often these days).
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.
Even like this where it's not just not 'joined-up', but not even independent cursive characters? This is just printed characters, as GP says, this seems particularly relevant because I'd think the hardest part of doing this with cursive handwriting would be all the combinations of the ways different letters flow together - if you restrict yourself to independent characters then you remove that problem.
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 (i.e. a ton of "sorts.")
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. I assume in the past it meant "don't buy a ton of these, and none in small sizes" because you weren't ever going to be putting a bunch on a page.
However, I can tell that you’re introvertive (retalics), a little ADHD (open/unconnected O character), have OCD tendencies (highly legible script), and borderline type A (lines in top of x close together and Fs)
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)
Hell yeah, keep that site up. What a marvel in this age of link rot.
Thank you, I’m never letting the domain go.
The prenup is watertight?
It's a lovely story, no cringe detected.
Thank you for that cringe! What a great way to end the week. Shabbat shalom.
this rules.
i actually think the design/layout is kind of timeless.
warmed my heart, wishing you a great life together
So is it true that Ruth had champagne on the flight without you?
So wholesome, and here's a belated congratulations!
Nice story. Most people dont meet in a "fate" kind of way but you did.
love this, what a great handmade feel
Well that was delightful.
Love it!!
[dead]
Kudos to you and the journey. I appreciate your honesty honestly about giving up on open source alternative for a quite cheap alternative for something you get to keep as your own is not a bad tradeoff.
Your story resonates. I am a self-taught creative and I get stubborn at times about wanting to use/bend a specific technology/tool to achieve a task; maybe it's a sunk cost fallacy OCD thing.
Your site design has character.
PS: Bookmarked your site with the tags - fonts, developer-blog, creative-sites, boutique-designs... on my firefox browser.
Others who have gone down a similar path:
- Amy Goodchild: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40408291
- Kathleen Tuite: https://kaflurbaleen.blogspot.com/2012/12/creating-font-from...
- Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/08/08/handwritten-font/
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.
Maybe you could use it as a font for black metal album covers
the whole "there are easier ways to do things so i never develop a skillset" is a big problem nowadays, imo. There are always easier ways to do stuff but in the long run they aren't the better way to do something because you wind up learning a system instead of how to do something.
i'll use my roommate as an example. Dude uses a knife sharpener system but can't actually sharpen a knife with a stone. The second his system doesn't work he can't actually sharpen a knife. All he knows is how to use the system. I see this in a lot of people nowadays. They know how to follow some instructions but the connections to why are never made.
As a society our basic skillsets are extremely atrophied because capitalism has turned everything into a pay-to-save-time system, or something.
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...
This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I am currently preparing for a workshop with children in which I want to let them “draw” their own website/web-apps. So far I did not plan to let them create their own fonts, as I did not know how to, but now I know. Thanks to you!
Ps: if you have any other ideas how to make such a workshop for children more exciting, please let me know! For instance, I wanted to let them create paper prototypes and then turn them into working click dummies so to cross the bridge between analogue and digital in way that feels natural to kids. Btw, by “kids” I refer to children at the age of 8-10 years old.
Hi, I would like to contribute to this if you'll have me.
I have been wanting to get experience educating young kids from my home town about technology how it can be used for creative work.
Based in Nigeria/Africa. I wrestle JavaScript with single quotes and no semi-colons.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Sure beats a mix tape.
Writing my handwriting would be a punishment.
So what happened with her? Was the effort worth it? Happily ever after?
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.
Sky Mall, LOL.
(No) thanks for the memories.
I did this for my old blog back in the 2000s - I used an online service that produced a pretty bad font that I could clean up using FontForge into something reasonable. It was a fun novelty but my penmanship is pretty bad and once in a while I would get flamed in the comments in my own handwriting.
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.
> They say that you remember more when handwriting than when typing
I believe that too.
Writing is one of my tools for taming my ADHD tendencies. I have journals of different sizes and when I am in the zone, I capture the moment in my own words and in my own way. I draw lines and art on my notes and just scanning a few lines on another day instantly immerses me back in the moment when the ideas/words/thought hit me.
For those who type better than they write, I don't see any reason to not do that, even though for me, it's pen on paper.
We're all different and I am a strong believer of the idiom that goes "One man's food..."
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).
This is not a humble brag by any means, just sharing my experience
I type 121 wpm and I simply can’t concentrate when writing by hand
It’s too slow and instead of focusing on formulating my thoughts or capturing what’s being said I get super fidgety
Not to mention my handwriting stinks
For me it’s a lot easier to remember when I’m fully immersed and processing ideas vs tediously writing
I do think this is probably just lack of handwriting skill - I definitely learned all this in school and took handwritten notes most of my life, but I suspect I never did it right back then
> It’s too slow and instead of focusing on formulating my thoughts or capturing what’s being said
AFAIU, if you're trying to take notes capturing what was said in a conversation between people.. to some extent you're going to need to focus and summarize anyway.
For handwriting notes for your own work.. I think writing stimulates & catalyses thought.
If you're in the flow, it doesn't make sense to stop and write notes. (Other than maybe so as to dispatch distracting thoughts, to preserve flow, or to enable flow for later).
If you're not flowing.. IME writing notes can help draw out thoughts: identify what it is you're confused or unclear about, what doesn't make sense, or what needs to be prioritised. -- For some reason, I've found pen & paper (especially 4-5 colours) to be more effective than just using a keyboard.
> I type 121 wpm
Your comment had me wondering how quick various systems are for writing. Shorthand can apparently get comfortably over 200wpm, but the bit that is I found wild is is how it looks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
Your handwriting skills are due to lack of practice. You weren't born typing at 121wpm.
I prefer typing for anything longer than a few words. But I can't type a picture (despite things like Mermaid and PlantUML) being useful.
I make extensive use of paper (and whiteboards if I'm sharing) for making pictures, mostly graph-like things such as flow diagrams, sequences, ERD etc. I feel somewhat "disabled" if I'm forced to just screen technology to do it (although Excalidraw is pretty good).
What a bummer the website https://www.calligraphr.com is a subscription model. I could impulsively pay $100 to get my handwriting as a TTF font and be quite happy about it.
TFA goes into this in some depth: there's an option to subscribe for one month with a one-time payment. After the month is up, your account automatically reverts to the free plan and you get an email with your fonts attached.
The subscription is only for backups and ongoing changes - you get to keep your font forever. I think the author mentions that the whole experience cost them about $10
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.
I always thought this was such a cool idea to preserve the handwriting style of someone you love (I adore my partner's handwriting), but the conversion to a font never seems to keep the spacing right, as you show in the final comparison.
I've been thinking of tinkering with an image to image generation model to convert text output from the font into something that looks closer to the handwritten version. Seems like it should be possible, but you need a lot of data.
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
There was retail boxed software that would do this on Windows 95 that included worksheets and software. You'd write examples in each square of the worksheet that you would then scan in and convert to TTF with their proprietary software.
I would say it seems like a simple enough task for a weekend project but I know better.
The description of trying to use FontForge cracked me up, I recall trying it myself a while ago and it going very similarly!
I might try this with my own handwriting. How well does it replicate an indecipherable scrawl?
Cool，I also want a font for my handwriting
Hmm. A font of my own handwriting sounds like unbreakable encryption!
Honestly, this idea is intriguing enought that I might actually pay for a month of that service. I'm willing to make that my first software purchase because I want to support symbiotic business practices like the one described (as opposed to adversarial rent-seeking ones seen all too often these days).
>Next, I wanted to change the heading fonts from a monospace font to something cursive
The font created is print, not cursive.
Maybe cursive in a "Comic Sans in the default 'cursive' fallback font on Windows" kind of way.
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.
Even like this where it's not just not 'joined-up', but not even independent cursive characters? This is just printed characters, as GP says, this seems particularly relevant because I'd think the hardest part of doing this with cursive handwriting would be all the combinations of the ways different letters flow together - if you restrict yourself to independent characters then you remove that problem.
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 (i.e. a ton of "sorts.")
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. I assume in the past it meant "don't buy a ton of these, and none in small sizes" because you weren't ever going to be putting a bunch on a page.
> I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography.
You're correct, "cursive" is a handwriting term, not a typographic one. The parent commenter almost certainly meant "script". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_typeface
Related:
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!
I’ve always been excited by posts like this but they always end up looking like far too much work for my taste.
This is the first one where I’ve thought, “hey I could do that over the course of a few of the baby’s naps!”
That font doesn’t suck.
However, I can tell that you’re introvertive (retalics), a little ADHD (open/unconnected O character), have OCD tendencies (highly legible script), and borderline type A (lines in top of x close together and Fs)
The kerning is not great.
I had an iPhone 2g back in 2010 when we had the first app store and cydia.
I had seen an app where one could draw each alphabet and it would spit out a font file....
They broke it with a paid update and I have never seen another app like that
If i do that you will need archaeologists to find out what i have writen
[dead]
[dead]