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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40408291

本文讨论了作者尝试将其笔迹数字化的经验，特别是创建散列或将其编码为用于在各种程序中键入的字体的经验。作者思考了连接字母的不寻常外观，质疑为什么某些字母尽管在传统草书中流畅地连接，但在数字版本中却不匹配。文本澄清，这种差异在于手写草书连接取决于前后字母的特定上下文，这与数字表示不同，无论相邻字符如何，笔画都保持一致。作者还分享了他们通过潜心练习提高书法的个人经历。他们建议尝试对特殊字母组合进行编码，并以大写芬兰语为例，因为其字符间距复杂。最后，他们承认手写版本和数字化版本之间存在细微差别，并指出在编程中准确建模和重新创建独特的、不可预测的手写风格所面临的挑战。

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.

The art at the end is quite beautiful. I wonder if the next step is putting this into a real font so that you can type with it in any program...

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 :)

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.

Obviously the letters connect, but where a given letter ends depends on the following letter, and where a given letter starts depends on the previous letter.

For example, in standard American cursive, b, o, v, and w have a top exit stroke, whereas the rest of the lowercase letters finish on the writing line. Combine this with the letter a, which has a top entry stroke, so the oa will join at the top, whereas ea will join from bottom to top.

I don’t see how this matters? They’re splines right? Just quickly writing those down I see a very minor variation in how they connect, but ultimately that variance’d be hardly noticable.

Regardless, the end of the o or e, to the beginning of a is still a straight line.

Absolutely, and that’s how I can see that it has more to do with the form of the letter than the fact that joining without adjustment is impossible.

Anyhow, I doubt we’re going to convince each other here. Since the tool is right there I might just give it a try.

> 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.

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).

Improving your handwriting is pretty simple, it's just mildly time consuming. I journaled for a month and just focused on how I wrote each letter. At first it took me half an hour to fill an A5 page - but my handwriting looked so good! It only took a month for my muscle memory to pick up the adjustments, and now I can write quickly and legibly in cursive.

I tell everyone who mentions bad handwriting the same thing. Buy a cheap journal, grab a pen you like, throw on something to listen to (music, a podcast, the news, a game stream, could be anything) and just write. What you write doesn't matter, just focus on putting down each letter exactly as you want it to look, and take your time.

that's cool, I wish I had writing good enough to want my own font :)

< 14.5, but if I switch this to a default size of 200, the point could be defined as 145, removing one character (the decimal place).

I see a function called "adjust". I don't know font specs, but what if this were serialized differently? 0,{x:12.2,y:13.2} -> 0,[12.2,13.2] and transformed in the "adjust" function?

It would be tough to model and/or mollify my handwriting in code or even ML because it really just depends on the day, and that's not usually a model input ;D

(TL;DR: it's somewhat inconsistent)

Type nerd reading the first part of the article "ugh oh my god the kerning oh ouch"

Nerd reading the whole article and looking at the crazy cool letter-form art at the end "wowwww".

Worth reading the whole article just to look at what an artist is doing with her tools from start to finish!

What I find most shocking is that this is not cursive at all, just print with some kind of cursive joinery.

s and z in particular look completely different in cursive, and b, f, l, k, and even h should also look quite different from this too. m and n are missing the extra arm.

Do Americans genuinely not know what cursive looks like? I understand it's been removed from their education for decades.

I do recognize however that the final result does indeed look quite close to natural print-style handwriting -- just don't call it cursive.

It's just not cursive. This is not controversial, there was a huge debate ~15 years ago when cursive instruction was removed from the curriculum in the US.

What is the point of arguing definitions in this case? It seems you think one thing. The Wikipedia article says another.

Are you claiming there is only one internally-consistent way of defining terms? Hopefully not.

Do you think that definitions exist "out there" as objective realities? Hopefully not, as they exist in your head. On what basis is the definition in your head better than Wikipedia's? Or vice versa?

Are you claiming definitions are determined by authorities? Hopefully not. What do you think the editors of dictionaries themselves have to say about that? As I understand it, they view themselves as collecting popular usage.

Does popular usage serve as the "proper" and "fixed" definition? If so, does that mean usage {1, 10, 100, 1000} years ago was wrong?

Are you making some kind of statistical claim; e.g. "most people would think that cursive is..."?

The trope of "No, Thing X is not Y, see Source S" is rather myopic. There is often no disagreement once you speak clearly about what you _mean_.

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