Single stroke font to mimic handwriting – options under $100?

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  • February 3, 2020 at 3:07 pm #28198
    markitzero
    Participant

    Have been enjoying playing with the V3 that I bought to replicate realistic human handwriting. I’ve read the User Guide and have played around with Hershey Advanced (“HA”), and if I’m understanding correctly, HA includes (i) a very basic set of stroke fonts, and (ii) a few basic tools to introduce imperfections/defects (baseline jitter, variable intents and spacing between letters, etc) that make it a tad more realistic.

    But the #1 tool I think I need for realistic handwriting is a stroke font with multiple glyphs per character (e.g. so that not all “T” letters look the same, which is a dead giveaway) but I don’t think that’s something I can get with any of the basic offerings from AxiDraw or its software, is that correct?

    Anyone have any good options to acquire stroke fonts for generating realistic handwriting? I perused the options at Quantum, but they start at $130+ per font if you want to use it in a Pen Plotter (and not just a word processing program)…which struck me as rather expensive for a single font.

    Anyone have any other recommendations? Or is $130 / font likely the best I’ll be able to do if I’m trying to replicate realistic handwriting? Thanks!

    February 3, 2020 at 3:22 pm #28199
    Windell Oskay
    Keymaster

    Those fonts are a little pricey, but they are quite good. The “Scriptalizer” software is proprietary to Quantum Enterprises, and is only available with their fonts.

    Now, there are lower cost stroke fonts available from https://www.singlelinefonts.com , and you are also welcome to use the ones that come with the software (see the last pages of the Hershey Advanced user guide for previews) or create your own. You also have alternatives to use no font at all– with direct handwriting capture, no two letters are ever exactly the same.

    However, if you want a single-stroke handwriting-like font that offers automatic letter variations, there is only one option that we are aware of, at any price.

    February 3, 2020 at 4:07 pm #28200
    markitzero
    Participant

    Thanks for the reply; I have indeed looked through the Hershey Advanced stroke font options and played with them a bit (including testing some of the ‘defect-adding’ tools). Have you considered adding multiple glyphs per character as one of the ‘defect’ options available in the standard AxiDraw/Inkscape package? IMO that’s the prime culprit that makes them still seem somewhat un-humanlike, and I would think that that wouldn’t be, relatively speaking, all that complicated to add. Looking for example at the “EMS Tech” Hershey Advanced stroke font — that’s a neat, arguably human-like font but wouldn’t simply having, say, 3 glyphs per character get you like 90% of the way there to being a credible reproduction of handwriting? It’s cursive, so none of the letters touch each other, so it seems like simply adding 2-3 subtle variants for each letter would be relatively straight-forward. Is that something you’ve considered for a future addition? (Or is it perhaps not as straight-forward as I might think?)

    February 3, 2020 at 5:14 pm #28202
    Windell Oskay
    Keymaster

    So far as I can tell, what you want already exists. It exists now (without having to wait for a new feature to be developed), and it exists in a variety of high quality versions.

    While there are some subtleties, I can say publicly and with simple clarity (1) we are not a font company and (2) I don’t see any reason for us to develop something that duplicates existing functionality.

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