Tooling
Synthetic handwriting
You write the alphabet once on a drawing tablet and the tool generates any text in your handwriting — pen pressure included.
720
samples of my own handwriting, ten per glyph — this is what makes the same word come out differently twice
- Conditions
- 72 glyphs across lowercase, uppercase, digits, punctuation and accents · captured on a drawing tablet, with stroke thickness taken from pen pressure
- Role
- Author
- Context
- Personal tool, built from samples captured on a drawing tablet
- Period
- 2026
- Status
- Working
The tool generates text that looks handwritten using the user’s own letters. There are two parts: a collector, in the style of a simple Paint, where you write each character on the drawing tablet; and a generator, which assembles the text from those samples with a live preview as you type.
The detail that separates the output from a font is the pen. The tablet reports pressure, and stroke thickness comes from that — heavier at the start of a letter, lighter on the exit, the way a hand does it. On top of that, the generator varies each occurrence of a letter instead of repeating the same sample: without it, three identical “a”s on one line give the whole thing away immediately, however good the stroke looks.
It works and has CI with lint and tests, but it’s still a personal tool — output quality depends entirely on how consistent your captured samples were. The repository is private.