How to: trace your own handwriting for plotting and engraving

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21

There’s manual and there’s manual! I have got to printing outlines (enlarged) on paper, then tracing approximate centrelines with a fine pen - gives me a smooth freehand- then scanning and…… this gives a clear but quite characterless version of my handwriting.

It works Ok with a very soft pencil and a loose mount if I vary downforce with my finger.

In the time it takes I could write a novel longhand!:shushing_face:

22

Stuffmadehere tried to tackle this problem, IIRC. It shows a lot of the subtle challenges of mimicking hand writing.

His challenge was a little different, because he handled arbitrary text.

Sandify has pretty good line drawing, but the way it splits up the letters wouldn’t work well, even if it lifted the pen. And it isn’t your handwriting.

IMHO, the shortest path to victory is to either use carve and accept the inaccuracies or to trace it in inkscape with a new path. It would be pretty labor intensive, but still probably competitive for one project.

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23

…write it by hand :grin:.

I don’t think we are here for the easiest way haha

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24

I would feel very stupid writing out the chatGPT generated Christmas letter by hand. It would be like lying, or imposing. Letting a robot do it, on the other hand - that’s just funny :laughing:

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25

What tool did you use for this? I’ve tried the “Custom stroke font” extension by User Profile | Khemadeva . | Inkscape. But it’s quite clunky to my taste, and the Norwegian letters complicated things furthermore…

Edit: I’ve tried a hundred things to make the stroke font extension work. Both windows and linux, with all the possible issues dealt with. Now I have reverted to Inkscape 1.2.2, and it works! Let’s see how long time it takes…

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26

I took a picture of my handwriting and loaded the image into inkscape. Then I traced a spline path by hand in inkscape over top of it, adjusting all the control points to produce a decent match.

I assigned object ids to each curve in the SVG file and wrote some software to extract the curves from the SVG file. Then an external program used a txt file and the extracted curves to generate another SVG file containing translated copies of the letters to produce the handwritten document.

So I’m sorry to say, tracing the letters is only a small part of the overall workflow. But for that specific problem I couldn’t find a better method than tracing by hand.

I should probably take a shot at making the program open source and user friendly (meaning instructions) so more people can use it.

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27

I - am - impressed.
Here I’m trying to figure out a freaking extension, while you are writing your own tools to do it!

Well - now I’ve figured it out. When using an older Inkscape version, the extion works flawlessly, even with all the accents. So - now the christmas letters are ready to be plotted! I have my handwriting as a hershey-font, which is super neat. It doesn’t look organic and natural at all, but thats no biggie. Using calligraphr the ligatures makes a big difference, but the extension doesn’t work with other than “normal” characters.

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28

I just looked at that plugin and it looks much nicer than my hack solution. I probably would have used that if I had known about it, rather than making my own solution!

29

Hmm, I have a Samsung tablet with a pen. A quick search didn’t find an app to draw a vector directly (and be able to export) but seems as though it should be possible. At work, I’ve written some apps that use a signature pad. Those store metadata to indicate how fast different parts of the signature are written. If you make the line thickness inversely proportional to the speed, it gives a nice result (and makes it obvious if a signature is fake). I have no idea what I’m doing in CNC land yet, but it would be cool if you could use a v bit and make the slower parts deeper to mimic that effect.

30

I have a pen on my phone, the S22 Ultra. Very neat, but not used as often as I thought… I tried the “HandWriting Font maker”, but I didn’t like the interface - it was lacking necessary functionality to export the fonts in a decent fashion.

I landed on Calligraphr, printing out template papers and filling them in with a thick pen. The calligraphr service is great(in combination with the inkscape stroke font extension), I warmly recommend it for this specific use case.

When it comes to mimicking different thicknesses of the pen stroke, I bet Ryans approach is good way to go. Using the carve function is Estlcam, you can fine tune and carve different depths using a router and a v-bit.

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31

If you want to trace your own handwriting to use for plotting or engraving, here is one way:

  • Use calligraphr.com to make a font of your own handwriting. Make a template, add necessary fonts for your language. Print and write out all the letters. I used a pencil first, trying to get a good stroke and then a pen, which worked well. Scan - clean up, adjust baseline, size and spacing. Export it to your computer.
  • Use inkscape with the Font stroke extension to convert your font to centerline font. First you must generate a template based on the handwritten font, and then you trace it using bitmap centerline tracing. Adjust the fonts accordingly and change id in xml to letter-name. Big a=A, small a=a, and so on. You can use accented letters and all the strange signs as well.When you are finished you can “generate font data”. The font is stored as svg in the extension subfolder.
  • the svg-font can be used both in Hershey-text tool and the extensions “Render text” (works very well - especially with the “selected box” function)

The extension creator has several videos, I found this one the most useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCsWAPx3y_g&list=PLxsh4i5F_h9E1pJDMRb4mfunzDpq2U2Ku&index=5

Inkscape 1.3.3 seems not to work with the extension, so you might have to downgrade to 1.2.2. (you can unzip it in a separate folder straight from the zip file, without installing)

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