6

Are there any practical libraries for generating simulated handwriting from a string of text?

This does not mean using a handwriting-like font. Rather, I'm referring to handwriting where each letters is rendered slightly differently and connected as in the normal rhythm of human handwriting.

themirror
  • 9,963
  • 7
  • 46
  • 79
  • The name has slipped my mind, but there is a font format that can render connecting lines between letters to better approximate handwriting. It won't make individual copies of letters slightly different, but they will connect to others more fluidly. – Blender Aug 22 '12 at 04:30
  • @Blender: You're thinking of a font with many [ligatures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature). – Snowball Aug 22 '12 at 04:33
  • Yep, fonts with ligatures is not relavent to this OP. An entire line (or at least an entire word) must be generated by an algorithm that simulates the physical movement of a pen wielded by a human hand. – themirror Apr 30 '13 at 00:20
  • FYI, although I still haven't found any leads, I noticed that the webapp DocuSign seems to be able to generate many styles of handwritten "signatures" for any name. I'll ask them how they do it. – themirror Aug 11 '13 at 05:00

3 Answers3

1

I've had some success using RNNLIB (original, Github fork) which uses AI neural networks.

There's a demo link on the Github readme and also at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html

Sample:

1 2 3 4 5

Note that neither demo has particularly good support for numbers (mostly unreadable) and capital letters aren't as well covered as their lowercase counterparts. Sometimes the generated images can be missing letters or just trail off.

Since it's neural network based, it's likely that some of these problems are a result of or could be improved by training data.

arcyqwerty
  • 10,325
  • 4
  • 47
  • 84
1

You can take a look at Muse-CGH, an open source tool for stylish Computer Generated Handwritings.

Muse can synthesize stylish English handwriting from plain texts. Its algorithm carefully connects strokes of adjacent characters to create cursive words and uses random perturbations to ensure that every character is unique in the rendering results. Moreover, it can also generate handwriting animations!

MrVPlusOne
  • 21
  • 3
0

Calligrapher AI lets you easily generate synthetic handwriting, with options to choose among several different styles:

screenshot

GirkovArpa
  • 4,427
  • 4
  • 14
  • 43