Followup: my SVG handwriting-font tool now does multiple variants per letter
A few months back I posted here about a tool I built (svgfontmaker.com) that turns a scan of your handwriting into an SVG font (original post). The feedback in that thread is what kept me working on it, I wanted something like this for myself, and figured the community might find it useful too
Biggest change since then (aside from fixing bugs around saving :) ): you can now create multiple variations of a single letter. Draw three different 'a's and the tool randomly picks between them as it lays out your text. This was the thing that bugged me most about plotting with a handwriting font, as soon I used the same word a few times times in a letter, it became apparent a machine wrote it. With variants on, it actually reads like a person wrote it.
Getting there took a detour. The SVG font format has no concept of randomized glyph alternates, so I added a document layer — your text now lives in a project where the variation logic runs at render time instead of being baked into a static font file.
I also worked on the stability of the app overall - a few people correctly called out that their work was getting dropped midway through making a font.
It is still pretty painful having to manually trace letters, and I don't quite have the automated processing at a point yet where it just creates a font automatically.
Would love feedback on:
- If you've used handwriting fonts for plotting, how are you currently tracing/cleaning your letters?
- What else would make this useful for you?