When making a personal website, one will naturally include a personal touch. What could be more personal than creating a font from your own handwriting? That’s what [Chris Smith] has done, and it looks great on his blog, which also has a post summarizing the process.
Like most of us [Chris] tried to use open-source toolkits first, but the workflow (and thus the result) was a bit wanting. Still, he details what it takes to create a font in Inkscape or Font Forge if anyone else wants to give it a try. Instead he ended up using a web app called Calligraphr designed for this exact use case.
Fair warning: the tool is closed-source and he needed to pay to get all the features he wanted — specifically ligatures, glyphs made from two joined letters. By adding ligatures his personalized font gets a little bit of variation, as the ‘l’ in an ‘lf’ ligature (for example) need not be identical to the stand-alone ‘l’. In a case of “you get what you pay for” the process worked great and to the credit of the folks at Calligraphr, while it is Software-As-Service they offer a one-time payment for one month’s use of the “pro” features. While nobody likes SaS, that’s a much more user-friendly way to do it — or perhaps “least-user-hostile”.
All [Chris] had to do was write out and scan a few sheets that you can see above, while the software handled most of the hard work automagically. [Chris] only had to apply a few tweaks to get the result you see here. Aside from websites, we could see a personalized font like this being a nice touch to laser cut, CNC or even 3D printed projects. If you don’t want a personalized touch, the “Gorton” lettering of retro machinery might be more to your liking.
What about people who write in Pashto? It’s one of the most advanced alphabets there is and it’s more robust than european writing systems.
Very interesting – how would you go about it?
More robust? Most Advanced?
You might as well claim Rotokas as being the most precise Alphabet with only 12 characters. Or Taki Taki with only 340 words as being the most
concise language.
Its just silly flexing.
How about some metrics of significance.
With only 40 million and 60 million Pashto speakers worldwide, almost entirely in Afghanistan (12 million) and Pakistan (27 million) compared to 1.5 billion people speak English worldwide, English is an official language in at least 67 countries, but it is spoken and used as a common language in many more,
When you consider first and second language speakers, English is the MOST spoken language in the world. If you further consider the localized concentration of the vast majority of other languages speakers, Its also the MOST widely spoken language in the world.
Pashto in a novelty language of little use nor importance.
And that’s why, with by far the most personal computer installs, Microsoft Windows is objectively the best operating system.
In 40 years no other company has managed to release on operating system that has gained real significant traction. As of August, Windows held roughly 70-73% of the global desktop OS market share, followed by macOS with about 15-16%, and Linux with approximately 4-4.3%.
So yes, objectively, windows is the best operating system for desktop computers.
Wow, that’s… kinda racist, given that Pashto is a language spoken by real people in real cultures. All the various conlangs are novelties of little use or importance, but to say that about someone’s native language? Just wow.
Open-source software to the rescue, in that case. The closed-source Caligraphr app [Chris] used might make things easier when using the roman script, but you can use Fontforge to create glyphs for a font in any script supported by UTF-8. Pashto, Hangul, Persian, Thai, Arabic, Hiragana, Cyrillic, the elder Futhark or even Shavian script — whatever floats your boat.
But, what if my handwriting is illegible?
So then it has the added benefit of being secure. Seems like a plus.
It does bring up the idea of developing something that translates one font to another, though. I wonder if there is anything like that out there. It would have to be something OCR based, I guess, in order to be universal. I might try to see if ChatGPT can create one if there isn’t.
I’m developing a web open source application to create your own handwritten font. It’s already functional, and I have plans to add new features. I encourage you to try it out. https://ownfonts.cielo.ovh/ Here’s the source code: https://github.com/c4p0/OwnFonts If you’re interested in collaborating on the project, you can send me a message on GitHub.
Both my grandfathers were doctors, so I usually can’t even read my grocery list that I wrote 15 minutes ago.
Great. Now anyone can send personal notes from “me”, in my own hand writing!
Identity absorbed by an AI hackbot in 60 seconds.
That’s probably the least of our worries.
I did exactly this with my wife. Many years ago I discovered Calligraphr and had my wife write down some lettering specimens. Since then, “You’re the best, I owe you ___” notes started appearing around the house all the time. Mysterious!
In Windows XP, there was a built in “My Font Tool for Tablet PC” utility that would let you write each character and turn it into a font. It didn’t produce designer-quality fonts, but it was super easy to use, and definitely novel for it’s time.
Looks like there is now a “Microsoft Font Maker” too in their windows app store, which presumably is an updated tool for the same purpose.
In 40 years no other company has managed to release on operating system that has gained real significant traction. As of August, Windows held roughly 70-73% of the global desktop OS market share, followed by macOS with about 15-16%, and Linux with approximately 4-4.3%.
So yes, objectively, windows is the best operating system for desktop computers.
Technically the most personalized font is your own handwriting PER RECIPIENT ! ;-)
meaning with emotion put in.
Aggressive for companies.
“Sonntagsschrift”[1] for family/friends/etc.
[1] https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=96422
Literally “Sundaycalligraphy” (fck English and it’s aversion to compundwords)