Handwritten.js

Creative

handwriting generation

SHOW HN2020

255points
80comments
#184of 3,028 in 2020
Top 7%of 2020 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

12 positive, 25 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 13 critical, out of 54 comments about the project. Thread score -0.02.

Execution: 1 for, 11 againstIdea: 8 for, 1 againstDesign: 2 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Output looks realistic and fun to play with

    From 4 comments
    • This is really neat! I love how it looks, and the selection of styles. A couple of times, using Style #2, it generated a bunch of loops at the end: Text: "The quick brown fox,…
      MikeTheGreat on HN
    • This is amazing. It's cool how you can drag the legibility slider up and down while it's writing and it responds live. It looks the most realistic to me when I alternate between…
      playpause on HN
    • Just tried it, font looks great on paper. I don’t have too many uses for this, but I bet it’ll be pretty handy for people who are still addicted to reading notes from printed…
      elorm on HN
    • Wonderful! And as it generates single stroke SVG exports, I can output to a laser cutter and have it write for me :) I can't think of a practical use for this, but that's not…
      detritus on HN
  • Interesting vector/stroke output for design uses

    From 2 comments
    • Having played with this a bit - if you can flesh it out a bit, I am sure you can monetize this. I've been dicking around with it for an hour or two and I'm getting results that -…
      detritus on HN
    • Wonderful! And as it generates single stroke SVG exports, I can output to a laser cutter and have it write for me :) I can't think of a practical use for this, but that's not…
      detritus on HN

Objections

  • Repeated letters and loops appear in some styles (e.g. 'x', 'fox')

    From 3 comments
    • This is really neat! I love how it looks, and the selection of styles. A couple of times, using Style #2, it generated a bunch of loops at the end: Text: "The quick brown fox,…
      MikeTheGreat on HN
    • This is super cool! A random FYI: the demo seems to consistently fail on the letter x when using style #9 and typing out: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog I tried a…
      sbarre on HN
    • Try "fox" in style 2 with maximum legibility. It goes loop-the-loop several times.
      TheNewAndy on HN
  • Letters look too uniform, like a font

    From 3 comments
    • How realistic is it to have no joined letters? Do many people really write large scale texts letter by letter with space between each? Sadly, the screenshot looks obviously…
      sago on HN
    • I don’t get this project. This is nothing special, you can very easily spot that every T is identical. You might as well just use a handwritten font.
      wonderlg on HN
    • This is insane busywork that I hated in college (xUSSR, 20+ years ago). I would scrutinize the example, though. I don't know how "clean" the documents are expected to be, but the…
      galkk on HN
  • Blank output or errors on some devices (WebGL backend error)

    From 2 comments
    • It’s giving blank output on iOS or is it because the model takes time to load? Also, is there any chance we can fine tune the model for each user by taking their handwriting in a…
      navanchauhan on HN
    • Yup, I did use the write button. It works on my laptop though. I checked the console and it was indeed throwing an error "Error: Backend name 'webgl' not found in registry"
      navanchauhan on HN

Requests

  • Add a license to the project

    From 2 comments
    • Hi, I like this, and found your project at Github. Could you add licence to your project, please! https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis
      mushishi on HN
    • I second this. Please add a license!
      ldd on HN
  • Train on a user's own handwriting

    From 3 comments
    • It’s giving blank output on iOS or is it because the model takes time to load? Also, is there any chance we can fine tune the model for each user by taking their handwriting in a…
      navanchauhan on HN
    • How much data is needed to train the model to replicate a specific person's handwriting? Could this recreate my hand writing with less than a page of notes in my own handwriting?
      aketchum on HN
    • How would you go about creating a minimal/medium source of input to train this? Could you create a 'written test' type thing - a couple of pages of selected forms of repeated…
      detritus on HN
  • Export as a font file

    From 1 comment
    • It would be great if this could output a generated font file, which can then be used on the web etc.
      gibs0ns on HN

Questions

  • How much handwriting data is needed to mimic a person's style

    From 2 comments
    • This looks very interesting. I wonder how much data would be required in order to imitate a particular handwriting style? i.e. if I know someone with a lovely penmanship and I…
      pdamoc on HN
    • How much data is needed to train the model to replicate a specific person's handwriting? Could this recreate my hand writing with less than a page of notes in my own handwriting?
      aketchum on HN
  • Why the output is slow

    From 2 comments
    • That's super-cool. Honestly that's what I was expecting the submission to be. When I looked at the example image in the original submission, the same letters all look basically…
      crazygringo on HN
    • It's not intentionally slowed down. The sampling process is computationally heavy and you'll notice improved performance when running it on better hardware. There are many…
      sjv on HN

Alternatives named

  • Handwriting fonts

    From 2 comments
    • I don’t get this project. This is nothing special, you can very easily spot that every T is identical. You might as well just use a handwritten font.
      wonderlg on HN
    • Is this different than a font?
      smabie on HN
  • OpenType contextual alternates for random glyphs

    From 2 comments
    • > Can a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph? In theory, yes, OpenType Contextual Alternates can do this. See "Introducing variety" on this page:…
      zimpenfish on HN
    • You might consider turning this into an OpenType font including all the random alternates:…
      montroser on HN
  • Pen plotters such as AxiDraw

    From 1 comment
    • Bulk mail is often produced using a letterpress-style machine. Personalized mail, on the other hand, is usually "handwritten" using a pen plotter (e.g., AxiDraw).…
      ziari on HN
  • sjvasquez handwriting-synthesis

    From 2 comments
    • Non-statistical methods of imitating handwriting are always fairly easy to identify as synthetic due to the uniformity of strokes and unnatural kerning (among other things). Even…
      sjv on HN
    • Thanks for sharing. If you don't mind, did you use Graves 2013 RNN or something recent/more advanced?
      fizixer on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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