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Makes writing letters a breeze.
September 8, 2009 4:18 PM   Subscribe

Make your handwriting into a font!

Print out a template, scan and upload to fontcapture, et voila! your own personal font.
posted by Korou (52 comments total) 69 users marked this as a favorite

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I won't be sending a random website the means to forge my writing anytime soon.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:21 PM on September 8, 2009 [3 favorites]


Hint: you don't have to send in your normal handwriting, you can draw bubble letters or what-have-you.
posted by sonic meat machine at 4:25 PM on September 8, 2009


How would the website know it's yours?
posted by rokusan at 4:26 PM on September 8, 2009 [3 favorites]


I don't remember how to write with ink.
posted by gman at 4:27 PM on September 8, 2009 [3 favorites]


For me, that's a really, really bad idea.
posted by zardoz at 4:27 PM on September 8, 2009


Luckily for me, my handwriting already looks like Comic Sans. No criminal mastermind would dare forge my signature, for fear of being ridiculed by his henchmen behind his back.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:29 PM on September 8, 2009 [9 favorites]


This sounds awesome, I may try it later.

Of all the things in life I have to worry about, "identity theft via uploaded sample of my handwriting (not associated with my name or social in any way)" is somewhere a few notches below "attack by giant carnivorous otter."
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:30 PM on September 8, 2009 [16 favorites]


This does indeed sound like three flavours of awesome.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 4:32 PM on September 8, 2009


Can I just steal Todd Kleins?
posted by Artw at 4:35 PM on September 8, 2009


My handwriting looks like Kings Cross. It takes me half an hour to sign a credit card receipt but it's worth it.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:35 PM on September 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


Brilliant. Fits perfectly into my diabolical plan.
posted by philip-random at 4:38 PM on September 8, 2009


Previously

What's fun is to use the end result as your default system (or browser) font, getting surreal results such as this, this, and this.

And if you have crowded handwriting, I'd recommend downloading a trial copy of FontCreator and using its kerning editor to customize the spacing. It makes the initial results almost spookily accurate.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:39 PM on September 8, 2009 [23 favorites]


Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I won't be swimming with giant carnivorous otters anytime soon, either. Also, my handwriting is completely illegible, so it would be pointless, anyway. And giant carnivorous otters smell like seven different kinds of ass.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:39 PM on September 8, 2009


This is extremely handy. Good find!
posted by Sys Rq at 4:39 PM on September 8, 2009


I believe that's the service I used to create the font I use for Monster Manual Comix. If I had Fontographer I'd go in and adjust the kerning and make a real bold/italic version, but it seems to work well enough.
posted by lore at 4:40 PM on September 8, 2009 [2 favorites]


Holy shit the guy who does Monster Manual posts on Metafilter.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:44 PM on September 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


Meh. Get the guy who wrote the Monster Manual on Metafilter, then I'll get all excited.

lore: just kidding! have my love child!

Also: I have plenty of crap fonts already. I need to pay for anotehr one because it'll be my crap font?
posted by GuyZero at 4:47 PM on September 8, 2009


Is this something I'd need to be able to read and write to care about?
posted by qvantamon at 4:47 PM on September 8, 2009


DOCTORS DO NOT DO THIS.
posted by jimmythefish at 4:48 PM on September 8, 2009 [2 favorites]


Also: I have plenty of crap fonts already. I need to pay for anotehr one because it'll be my crap font?

It's free!
posted by Sys Rq at 4:48 PM on September 8, 2009


There is a guy who makes his living doing this.
posted by krinklyfig at 4:51 PM on September 8, 2009


It's free!

Hm well, free is good and the crap part is really all my fault... free crap. Tempting.
posted by GuyZero at 4:55 PM on September 8, 2009


I use a font from my own handwriting for the window title bar font on my work PC.

I tried using it in an IM client and it kinda freaked me out.
posted by eyeballkid at 5:12 PM on September 8, 2009


eyeballkid: "I tried using it in an IM client and it kinda freaked me out."

You don't know the half of it...
posted by Rhaomi at 5:14 PM on September 8, 2009 [4 favorites]


You don't know the half of it...

Awesome.
posted by eyeballkid at 5:15 PM on September 8, 2009


One of the comments on the associated blog seems especially useful - I made a font by copying the PDF into a paint program and free-handing it with my mouse. - if you don't have the scanner and printer.
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:23 PM on September 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I won't be sending a random website the means to forge my writing anytime soon.
Use case: You just signed something you regret putting your name on.

Quickly, you ...
posted by krilli at 5:24 PM on September 8, 2009 [6 favorites]


Awesome, krilli!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:30 PM on September 8, 2009


I thought the only people whose signature looked like their handwriting were twelve-year-old girls with excellent penmanship.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 5:37 PM on September 8, 2009


My font would probably be mistaken for Wingdings.
posted by brundlefly at 5:38 PM on September 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


I don't even have a signature any longer, just a random scribble. Electronic signature pads did away with my formerly OK sig.
posted by maxwelton at 5:42 PM on September 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


Oh man.

I work in the kind of office where we get regular letters and faxes hand-written in what I call "Disturbed Sans Serif", that really recognisable handwriting of the usually elderly, often semi-literate and generally angry-at-the-world correspondent. Sometimes it's block capitals, more often it's careful primary school pre-cursive, very rarely it's copperplate. It's almost always ballpoint pen, it's always really carefully printed, and the style more than anything just shows the years and years of the author's tenderly nursed sense of grievance.

When I get a spare hour I'm going to put a collection of those letters through this website and I'll fuck with my workmates' heads writing my own using the Crazy Correspondent Font Of Doom.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:43 PM on September 8, 2009 [4 favorites]


My signature went to shit since I got married and changed my last name. The first stroke of the first letter of my maiden name goes from top to bottom. The first stroke of the first letter of my married name goes from bottom to top. It has been unbelievably hard to rewire this in my brain.
posted by desjardins at 5:47 PM on September 8, 2009


One of the comments on the associated blog seems especially useful - I made a font by copying the PDF into a paint program and free-handing it with my mouse. - if you don't have the scanner and printer.


If only the result of trying to write with my mouse didn't look like a five-year-old's crayon scrawl, complete with letters of varying sizes.
posted by cmgonzalez at 6:13 PM on September 8, 2009


I used similar service a while ago and now use the resulting font (cleaned up a bit using FontForge) on my blog. Everyone tells me it looks horrible, but I don't care. It's my blog expressing my thoughts in my handwriting, so there.
posted by AndrewStephens at 7:01 PM on September 8, 2009


desjardins: "My signature went to shit since I got married and changed my last name."

In my experience, the piece of paper a bride used to practice her new signature can be a very nice and evocative souvenir to share with children and grandchildren if you ever plan to have any. My step grandmother had a sheet of paper just full of her married name, it was the first time I ever saw her simultaneously as the child practicing writing her own name, the woman committing to who she would become in her adult life, and the grandmother I knew personally. My birth mother shared hers with me, and it was an introduction to a profound, if difficult, discussion of what happened between her and my father. There is a way that it is more personal than a wedding photo.
posted by idiopath at 7:11 PM on September 8, 2009 [2 favorites]


Zalgo.ttf
posted by krilli at 8:26 PM on September 8, 2009 [3 favorites]


In my experience, the piece of paper a bride used to practice her new signature can be a very nice and evocative souvenir to share with children and grandchildren if you ever plan to have any.

What about the three hundred other pieces of paper from third grade on, where she practiced her name with the last name of every cute boy's last name?

It seems too poignant to waste on mere blackmail.
posted by rokusan at 8:38 PM on September 8, 2009


Why limit yourself to letters? I made a dingbat font of penises and vaginas.

Well, no, I didn't.
posted by MegoSteve at 9:28 PM on September 8, 2009


But, um...there is no way to create flow between letters. This is awful for those of us who spent hours learning how to properly connect b's to u's and g's to h's, who finished grade school handwriting with mastery only to be told not to use script anymore, only print would be accepted, this was high school, so stop it with those cute little tails on your q's.

As a result my writing is a mash up of Bickham Script Pro and Comic Sans, and I wont have it misrepresented.
My q tails are classic. Vintage even.
posted by toni_jean at 11:27 PM on September 8, 2009


I was about to try it out and then I remembered the nightmare that is the font system(s) on Linux. Ugh. I will freely admit that Windows and Macs have Linux beat handsdown when it comes to installing fonts (at least, as of 5 years ago--the last time I dared face this issue).
posted by DU at 4:35 AM on September 9, 2009


I was about to try it out and then I remembered the nightmare that is the font system(s) on Linux. Ugh. I will freely admit that Windows and Macs have Linux beat handsdown when it comes to installing fonts (at least, as of 5 years ago--the last time I dared face this issue).

Download kfontview (comes with kubuntu). One-click installing. See?

It could be because I'm incredibly vain, but I sort of love this.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:49 AM on September 9, 2009 [1 favorite]


My signature went to shit since I got married and changed my last name.
Hah! My maiden name is 5 letters long. My first husband's name is 5 letters long. This guy that I'm married to now? His name is a freaking 12 letters. My hand gets fatigued by the time I get to the 6th or 7th letter. After an impressive and graceful "W" it all sort of dribbles away like forgotten, bedraggled children chasing after an impeccably-attired aristocrat.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:37 AM on September 9, 2009 [3 favorites]


Lord this is the answer to all of my prayers!!!!!
posted by The1andonly at 7:04 AM on September 9, 2009


DU: You stick a ttf in ~/.fonts/
posted by [@I][:+:][@I] at 12:18 PM on September 9, 2009


...attack by giant carnivorous otter

Don't be joking about El Lobo del Río. They have no natural predator, and will devour your flesh (if you're a fish or crab).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:31 PM on September 9, 2009


The best thing about computers is that you can always read the writing (ok, not the best thing. This seems to defeat that purpose...
posted by entropic at 1:12 PM on September 9, 2009


I was about to try it out and then I remembered the nightmare that is the font system(s) on Linux. Ugh. I will freely admit that Windows and Macs have Linux beat handsdown when it comes to installing fonts (at least, as of 5 years ago--the last time I dared face this issue).

You're joking, right? It's /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts. You save your fonts there. Changing your font is usually as easy as right-clicking your desktop.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:53 PM on September 9, 2009


You're joking, right? It's /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts. You save your fonts there. Changing your font is usually as easy as right-clicking your desktop.

In DU's defense, before I figured out the kfontview thing, I had to google which folder they go on every single time. One click installation is much, much easier.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 2:04 PM on September 9, 2009


I think I've manually installed fonts maybe once. Every other time has been through the package manager.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 2:07 PM on September 9, 2009


I'm going to fill in all the letters with some other letter (for 'a' and 'A' I put '7') so that I have a secret code automatically installed in my keyboard! And only I will have the key! Mastermind, bwahaha!
posted by six-or-six-thirty at 3:42 PM on September 9, 2009


~/.fonts has to be a new thing because it definitely did not used to be that easy. There were at least different formats, an incompatible utility for each and even X configuration that had to be done.
posted by DU at 5:27 PM on September 9, 2009


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