I am pretty convinced that coding my handwriting could be considered a one-way hash; there is no way to decipher what the hell I was trying to say when reading it.
It's getting worse every time I am forced to write now too, since I do it so infrequently. I type nearly everything now, and I only write stuff with a pen (outside a signature) roughly two or three times a year, and every time I do it's more difficult to figure out what I actually wrote.
I wish there were an easy way to print stuff on the go, and then I'd never have to use a pen again; maybe as we get to a paperless society that'll be the case.
Plottable fonts are a thing! They're different from the "normal" font we think of, because they need to be a path to be traced instead of an outline to be filled.
Yeah, even "normal" fonts have ligatures (a couple common ones in many fonts are fl and ti though they don't appear to be used in the font being used to render this comment), so this is definitely no technical obstacle if one really wants a font. Obviously a bunch of work to create, but pretty cool to have!
I am really confused about the point of joining letters not matching up. The whole point of cursive to me is that you do not take your pen off the paper, so the way to join letters is built in. Author seems to have had issues because she’s not actually writing that way?
That said, I really enjoy the whole rest of this writeup for just being the simplest possible way you can go about drawing a bunch of letters on screen without messing with fonts :)
> The whole point of cursive to me is that you do not take your pen off the paper, so the way to join letters is built in.
This is both correct in the way you word it here, and, incorrect regarding your interpretation. The connection between letters in cursive is context-dependent. A “b” followed by an “a” or an “o” will likely have variations since it improves the readability of what you write. Similarly there are times where you might not want to keep the pen on the paper between letters within a word, which doesn’t break the “rules” of cursive.
You may have been taught differently and maybe your teachings were correct. I’m not aware of any form of cursive where connections are not supposed to be context-dependent though.
I'm wondering if cursive has been taught differently over the last few decades -- I was taught in the 70s, and at that time the instruction was that letters always start and end at the same point. That instruction clearly does not match up to the article or some comments, but rather than quibbling over which of us is correct, I'm more curious how the teaching may have changed over the years?
Zaner-Bloser looks the closest to what I was taught, but is not a perfect match.
I think I suffer from ‘what I was taught is correct’ syndrome. Of course multiple ways can be correct, but it certainly does address the ‘not matching up’ point
No they don’t. At least in my cursive writing. Line from end of last letter to beginning of next letter is always correct, since you don’t take your pen off the paper. That’s not different between the code and the reality.
If your letters look wrong it’s because you are starting them in the wrong place. Or because you take your pen off the paper. Letters either end in the bottom right or top right, and begin in the upper left. A straight line should always be correct.
The issue with the a that looks like an e is because the author is trying to start writing her a on the left side of the character.
Obviously the letters connect, but where a given letter ends depends on the following letter, and where a given letter starts depends on the previous letter.
For example, in standard American cursive, b, o, v, and w have a top exit stroke, whereas the rest of the lowercase letters finish on the writing line. Combine this with the letter a, which has a top entry stroke, so the oa will join at the top, whereas ea will join from bottom to top.
I don’t see how this matters? They’re splines right? Just quickly writing those down I see a very minor variation in how they connect, but ultimately that variance’d be hardly noticable.
Regardless, the end of the o or e, to the beginning of a is still a straight line.
Interesting. In the 90s in Germany I learned that for some letters you lift the pen, even though the result will look connected, e.g. "ac" would lift after the a, draw the c leftwards, touching the end of the a and then swing around to the next letter, kinda like this, but leaving no gap between the letters: /C
Also, t would be disconnected with itself, being written like /| followed by a - overlapping the |
Is it possible to encode (in some existing program) for letter pairs where each code point is the right-hand side of the first letter of the pair plus the left-hand side of the second letter in the pair ?
I ask because upper-case Finnish has lots of really gnarly whitespace/kerning issues. Letter pairs like LJ and KY and YT and VY that could get special attention, even stroke joining, in a font such as I describe.
So a fragment like " KEVYT." could be encoded as (spc + lh-K), (rh-K + lh-E), (rh-E + lh-V), (rh-V + lh-Y), (rh-Y + lh-T), (rh-T + period).
that's cool, I wish I had writing good enough to want my own font :)
< 14.5, but if I switch this to a default size of 200, the point could be defined as 145, removing one character (the decimal place).
I see a function called "adjust". I don't know font specs, but what if this were serialized differently? 0,{x:12.2,y:13.2} -> 0,[12.2,13.2]
and transformed in the "adjust" function?
Improving your handwriting is pretty simple, it's just mildly time consuming. I journaled for a month and just focused on how I wrote each letter. At first it took me half an hour to fill an A5 page - but my handwriting looked so good! It only took a month for my muscle memory to pick up the adjustments, and now I can write quickly and legibly in cursive.
I tell everyone who mentions bad handwriting the same thing. Buy a cheap journal, grab a pen you like, throw on something to listen to (music, a podcast, the news, a game stream, could be anything) and just write. What you write doesn't matter, just focus on putting down each letter exactly as you want it to look, and take your time.
Toshi Omagari’s Tabulamore is the most gorgeous connected monospace font I’ve seen so far. The rest of the fonts in that tabular type collection aren’t connected but still pretty good fonts and they’re all steals at the price he has them listed.
It would be tough to model and/or mollify my handwriting in code or even ML because it really just depends on the day, and that's not usually a model input ;D
The HN homepage has two brilliant articles from Amy. The website is now on my RSS Watchlist. There are quite a few interesting articles about the soothing existence between Art and Programming.
What I find most shocking is that this is not cursive at all, just print with some kind of cursive joinery.
s and z in particular look completely different in cursive, and b, f, l, k, and even h should also look quite different from this too. m and n are missing the extra arm.
Do Americans genuinely not know what cursive looks like? I understand it's been removed from their education for decades.
I do recognize however that the final result does indeed look quite close to natural print-style handwriting -- just don't call it cursive.
There is no "one cursive" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive. It looks to me that hers would be under the Italic family. I personally changed my handwriting to a similar style and find it much more legible.
It's just not cursive. This is not controversial, there was a huge debate ~15 years ago when cursive instruction was removed from the curriculum in the US.
What is the point of arguing definitions in this case? It seems you think one thing. The Wikipedia article says another.
Are you claiming there is only one internally-consistent way of defining terms? Hopefully not.
Do you think that definitions exist "out there" as objective realities? Hopefully not, as they exist in your head. On what basis is the definition in your head better than Wikipedia's? Or vice versa?
Are you claiming definitions are determined by authorities? Hopefully not. What do you think the editors of dictionaries themselves have to say about that? As I understand it, they view themselves as collecting popular usage.
Does popular usage serve as the "proper" and "fixed" definition? If so, does that mean usage {1, 10, 100, 1000} years ago was wrong?
Are you making some kind of statistical claim; e.g. "most people would think that cursive is..."?
The trope of "No, Thing X is not Y, see Source S" is rather myopic. There is often no disagreement once you speak clearly about what you _mean_.
Did you read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article? It contrasts cursive with block letters.
Anyway, you're of course free to call block letters cursive. It's not the traditional meaning, and it's interesting to observe that people don't even know that anymore.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Second, please recognize that my comment was based on what you wrote above: "It's just not cursive." But it seems my point didn't get across.
> No, your point came across. You think every sort of handwriting is cursive, and I don't think I can help you with that :)
No, that was not my point.
I'll try it a different way with two questions and a comment: what is the point of arguing definitions? What does it get you? If your point is communication and persuasion, pointing to a definition and asserting that it settles the issue isn't a great strategy.
And by the way, it is incorrect to claim I something like a complete relativist regarding definitions; I am not saying anything goes. For example, I said above that internal consistency matters.) Very important is a particular focusing goal other citing authority (such as effective communication) which involves 2+ parties.
Typo fixes: "And by the way, it is incorrect to claim I'm something like a complete relativist regarding definitions; I'm not saying anything goes. For example, I said above that internal consistency matters. It is important to have a particular focusing goal other than promoting one definition over another. For example, if your goal is effective communication you probably won't be tempted to say things like "It's just not cursive."
The description of "italic script", that the parent claimed was "one of the many types or cursive", explicitly says
> Italic script, also known as chancery cursive and Italic hand, is a semi-cursive, slightly sloped style of handwriting and calligraphy that was developed during the Renaissance in Italy.
Various childhood experiences convinced me that adults were stupid. One was wearing a belt I didn't need, because that's what one did, and scratching my Dad's guitar. This cost me a career of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
I rejected cursive after one year, reverting to printing despite all pressures. I couldn't see any upside to cursive. It was harder to read, a concession to lazy adults with poor motor control. A few years later I won a penmanship contest.
What I want to do with these ideas is automate turning computer-generated animation into animation with a hand-drawn life, using machine learning to tune the parameters to express my tastes.
This is all connected: My brother and I were fascinated when we learned how animation worked. I then found myself deathly bored in an hour of school penmanship printing practice, so I worked on animating letter F's turning into letter G's, and so forth. The teacher left me alone until other kids asked what I was doing, and I taught them. She swiftly collected all papers, went to get a primitive projector that barely escaped incinerating our work, and praised various students' penmanship. My collaborators were trembling that they'd be chosen next. We didn't yet understand that one attempts to stop a revolution by cutting off the head.
I was stunned to realize that the ridicule didn't hurt. These experiences helped me learn to think independently as a mathematician.
Americans genuinely do know what cursive looks like, and it's still taught to this day, source 3 kids who know how to write in cursive but weren't taught be me. Maybe broad inaccurate generalizations are the issue here, not American's cursive learnin'.
