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.
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?
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.
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).
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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQO2XTP7QDw
Was very fun to watch and he also explains the trials and errors, he did.
There is also a link to a very interesting repository of handwriting synthesis: https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
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 :)
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.
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.
it's similar to kerning with even non-joining fonts, you need to encode how various sequences of letters appear
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).
https://certik.github.io/slabikar-otf/