Esotropiart

Well, I made a new handwriting font finally. The first version of my handwriting font was made about eleven years ago. I figured it was time to make a new one. Not only has my handwriting changed over that period of time, but I felt there were some inadequacies in the way I created the first one. I have slightly better software now, and I wanted to see if I could get better results.

Believe it or not, the primary software is the same. 11 years ago I used CorelDRAW 8 to export to a TrueType font file. I did the same today. So if that didn't change, what did, right? Well, for starters, I got a better scan of my handwritten characters (glyphs in font language).

Before doing the brunt of the work in creating the various font glyphs, I tested several types of pens and paper. Both pen and paper choice are vital to getting a good scan. A bad pen will skip, smear, smudge and produce an inconsistent line quality. Of course, if a font file could capture all these imperfections, the results would be more realistic. However, the nature of how fonts work limits this sort of realism. I'll outline some of the key limitations of font files in a minute. I found that a fine line art pen is a good choice. This type of pen is used commonly in technical illustrations, comic and manga art. Some examples would be a Staedtler Mars Pigment Liner (what I used - 0.05 to be exact), Sakura Pigma Micron, Copic Multiliner, etc. Usually such pens come in a variety of thicknesses, denoted in decimals of a millimeter (0.1, 0.05, 0.03, etc.) The thickness used for the purposes of making a handwriting font depends on the look you are after. If you wish the characters to be bold, a thicker pen nib is in order. Thin, crisp lines require a thinner point.

Paper choice is at least as important as pen choice (more in my opinion). Most paper is quite absorbent, and this is not a particularly good thing for making fonts. Since ink is a wet medium, it will not only soak into paper, but it will spread or "bleed" ever so slightly. To the naked eye, this blurred edge is not very apparent. However, when the characters are scanned into the computer at a high resolution, all the irregularities and fuzzy edges inhibit a clean looking result. There are several papers that are so smooth that their surface resembles plastic. Vellum, mylar, very tightly pressed bristol, polypropylene, etc. Some are so plastic-like that the ink can smudge or smear easily (Yupo is a type of plastic). These types will give a perfectly smooth result, but care has to be taken not to smudge the letters, especially in the scanning process.

Besides giving special attention to choosing quality pen and paper, I also used a new vector tracing tool. Vector tracing involves converting bitmap graphics (composed of grids of limited resolution squares called pixels) into mathematically calculated lines and curves called vectors. This conversion process is the key "magical" step between scanned handwriting samples (bitmap) and a formatted font (vector). Back in 1997 the only halfway decent tracing software I had was CorelTRACE. By todays standards this program isn't very good. Out of all vector tracing software I've used (a bunch) I have found Inkscape to be the best and most reliable. The results are stunning. Even when compared next to VectorMagic, an online tracing option, Inkscape comes out on top or at least equivalent. Inkscape is a free, open-source vector illustration application along the lines of Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Serif DrawPlus, Xara, Microsoft Expression, and so on. Not only is Inkscape free, but it has an immensely powerful set of tools. In some areas it is better than all the above listed commercial applications. It lacks very little in functionality that the big, expensive alternatives have to offer.

Okay, now for the font caveats:

1. Fonts are composed of vector graphics. This means that all the letters and symbols have to be converted to mathematically calculated lines, rather than a matrix of pixels, like bitmaps are composed of. This vector quality of fonts is what allows them to be scaled to various sizes and not lose their visual quality and smooth edges. This is why it is important to choose a good pen and paper, so the edges of the drawn letters do not bleed.
2. Most known font formats only allow one graphic per letter or symbol (aka character). This means that an "A" will always look the same. Look at the following repeated characters and how each one is exactly the same: A A A A B B B B C C C C x x x x y y y y z z z z. While natural handwriting varies greatly (try writing one letter ten times in a row - each one will look slightly different), fonts can only present one version of each letter. To capture the essence of one's handwriting attention has to be given to draw the letters naturally. Fortunately most people don't realize each letter looks exactly the same in a handwriting font because in natural writing rarely more than 2 of the same letter occur in sequence. Unless you do comic book captions and type stuff like "AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!"
3. Because of these and other factors, not everyone's handwriting can be accurately made into a font. My handwriting is fairly ideal because I draw each character separately with some space in-between. Most people's handwriting has some pieces that connect between letters, and these connections vary depending on what letter comes next. Other handwriting is almost entirely cursive or really sloppy. None of these types of handwriting can be made into fonts - at least with current font "technology" and file formats. I've often thought fonts should be more robust and offer intelligent ways to accommodate some of these caveats. I've got "better things to do" than help the world by creating an improved font format though. Sorry.

Why is cursive handwriting a barrier for fonts? Well, think about it. In cursive, a single flowing line forms each word. Each the letters are connected by trailing loopy lines. The problem is that these connections don't always occur at the same point in vertical space. Most of the connections occur at the baseline or bottom of the letters. However, some occur higher up - consider the lower-case letters b, o, v and w in standard cursive writing. The little connecting loops are at the top. Well, if each separate letter is a static graphic, how can a loopy line up high connect with a loopy line down at the baseline? Truth is, they cannot (unless you do a little trickery by making each meet in the middle, cutting the length of each in half - blah blah blah). Most people's handwriting is far more complex than having only 2 connection positions, as the presence or absence of connection between letters varies depending on which letters are written and in which order (and on which day, what their mood is, etc!). Maybe someone connects a d and e when they follow each other as in the word "deputy", but otherwise a d and e never have connecting loop tails when combined with other letters. A standard font cannot account for this type of variation. The best handwriting candidate to be made a font is printed letters that are each separated by some space.

Just so you can appreciate my new font, I'm going to copy this entire blog entry into an image using the new font. Other than changing the color on different paragraphs and adding lines for effect, the text is rendered using the new font. By the way, pretty cool that I was able to get an image that is 600 pixels wide by 2635 pixels tall to be around 200K, huh? :) My little secret - well, not really. The file could have been even smaller if I didn't go color crazy! (check this out - 135K). And if you noticed a few differences between the text below and the text above - too bad! I made the image, copied it to the blog entry, and then made some revision to the blog entry. I don't want to remake the image... too lazy (not that anyone would ever notice that!).