I just spent the last 24 hours building... a free tool to create your very own handwriting font quickly within the browser (no logins, all local processing):

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@ChrisPirillo now, if only people could read my handwriting i could use this

[fasnix@fe.disroot.org]

@ChrisPirillo
That's great!
Just yesterday that's what I thought about!
Thanks, mate!

[twoowls73@mastodon.scot]

@ChrisPirillo brilliant! Thank you

[exil_inselette@norden.social]

@ChrisPirillo I've tried it now. It's really great! But there's one thing I really miss: correct quotation marks. In German, we do them like „this“: a small 66 at the bottom front, a small 99 at the back (not actual numbers, of course, but the numbers illustrate where they are thick and how they are curved).
Edit: I tried entering them as alternatives to " but I can't get them to work on the keyboard

[0@corteximplant.com]

@ChrisPirillo can you please start putting alt text on your images? you've been part of the Internet for so long, if anyone might understand the importance of alt text I'd assume it would be you

[ganneff@fulda.social]

@ChrisPirillo Nice! How much will it be off if I print on A4 instead of Letter size paper?

[joostvb@mastodon.green]

@ChrisPirillo i love this, awesome work

[cpy@mastodon.social]

@ChrisPirillo While I appreciate both the effort and craft - you clearly overestimate the legibility of my handwriting. By a lot.

[orsomaria@mastodon.uno]

@ChrisPirillo Bro, you cooked up a hit great

[rockerz@mastodon.art]

@ChrisPirillo

I am sooo glad that our entire ecosystem is being destroyed for something absolutely impossible to avoid such as... check notes... bad handwriting fonts.

[oldrawgabbit@mastodon.world]

@ChrisPirillo I love the idea but my handwriting is cursive, and not all capitals.

[binchicken@rants.au]

@ewen Yeah-nah, I'll give it a miss. This vibe-coding fails on Step 1 where it specifies a paper size that induces a "PC LOAD LETTER" error that drives people in most parts of the world into such a rage that they smash their printer into smithereens. I don't know what it means that a planet-boiling chatbot connected to an IDE didn't include an option for A4 paper, but it says something about the human who thought it's a good idea to publish the result.

[dl2jml@mastodon.radio]

@ChrisPirillo @exil_inselette I'll second the request for diacritics and A4 paper size.

[samueljohnson@mstdn.social]

@Rockerz @ChrisPirillo Just FYI

I have a signature font I created with Fontographer. It contains three signatures: my initials, first name and full name.

More than once I have had to return "signed" copies of documents by reply and in circumstances where I could create PDFs but wasn't able to print.

Chopping down trees to print, then scan, then email, or worse, expend energy transporting documents, isn't the alternative you think it is.

Any font that avoids that necessity is useful.

[delilahtech@tech.lgbt]

@ChrisPirillo
How is it handling variations on a letter?

It appears that you have three samples per letter? Does it just rotate through?

Does it differentiate between uppercase and lowercase lettersets?

[rockerz@mastodon.art]

@samueljohnson

You completely miss the point. Whatever use cases you can find for these fonts it doesn't address the problem of creating a software using AI. **THIS** is the point.

As you pointed out, this kind of tool exists since almost forever, I remember using some probably even before the Y2K bug stuff. There were no LLM back then. Developing software means doing your bloody job (yes, even if this job happens on your spare time and then given for free). Is it tedious? Yes. So what?

[77nn@goto.77nn.it]

@ChrisPirillo

Thank you for this app!

I was able to get my handwritten font in a few attempts. I am missing a finer felt tip pen, but I will get one.

I had some issue in getting the lowercase g, p, q with correct baseline, and in the end I had to use #fontforge to adjust them.

I also noticed that accentded "i" automatically gets an accent over the dot and not in place of. Also the € sign is missing, while it's quite common for europeans.

Ligatures seems to be not working correctly. If I activate them I get mixed uppercase and lowercase, even if I correctly selected the first line uppercase  and the second and third lowercase. It looks like pre-defined ligatures are not optimal. Probably they are fine for typography, but for handwriting you really need another set. Then one should adapt to their writing.

Overall it was a nice experience, I recommend it and I hope you will continue working on it!

I was concerned that small size would render the font illegible, but I was wrong. It is more legible that certain actual fonts.

#font #handwriting

[samueljohnson@mstdn.social]

@Rockerz I see. You're against algorithms you can run locally that can create a handwriting font but presumably would have no issue with similar algorithms that run locally that do handwriting recognition. Got it.

I'm tempted to wonder what would have made your point more clearly.

[buster@woof.group]

@ChrisPirillo incredible. As a healthcare professional I'm going to have fun with some epic trolling now.
'supports ligatures' means I'm going to make it match my writing for certain words like communication that come out like Cuuuuutuuuum

[der_mit_ph@toot.berlin]

@dl2jml @ChrisPirillo @exil_inselette The Code to generate these is there. And as the code is also looking for calibration marks - have you tried printing on A4 paper?

I haven’t, as I didn’t find time yet, but please: You’re sounding extremely entitled to something you’ve been given for free. How about helping to debug?

E.g., „I tried printing in A4, I expected this to happen, but I got this result - could you pleas take a look?“