I've often thought that if I wrote an ebook reader, I'd use a font that mimics the imperfections in printed works. I'd have maybe 20-30 different 'a' images, and select one randomly and then 'jitter' its positioning a bit.
I'd also use a background that looks like paper, rather than the perfect white or sepia ones current readers do. Heck, it would be easy enough to scan a few dozen blank sheets of paperback paper, and then pick one randomly for each page.
>…He selected four subtly different alternates for each character that, combined, would make the text look random enough to look authentic while keeping the glyph set manageable
Article: http://www.monotype.com/expertise/case-studies/a-bespoke-han...
Visual comparison of the alternates: http://www.monotype.com/media/1837/quentin-alternates2.png
My parents' handwriting was borderline illegible, so they took to typing letters on a manual typewriter. Typewriters suffering from all the problems of complex finicky mechanisms, and being a write-only medium, resulted in a pleasing quirkiness that is completely absent from email. Read enough typed text, and you begin to recognize a person's particular "hand" at the typewriter, as well as the machine's individual quirks. Electric typewriters put an end to most of that, and email finished it off.
I figure I get the best of ebook and hardcopy this way!
> I then run 'em through the scanner
Does that take a long time? Do you have a setup to make it faster than scanning page by page?
> I've often thought that if I wrote an ebook reader, I'd ...
Once all the diverse books are converted to ebooks, them all being rendered in the same perfect font on the ereader kinda lends them an off-putting sterility.
I thought of writing a word processor where each glyph created a bump map so as you type the characters are slightly indented as if stroked by a type writer.
I’ve had similar thoughts on text layout as well. And I’d really love it if someone were to sponsor me to make such a thing, because as it is I doubt I’ll ever get to it… so many things to do, so little time.
As a practising Christian I find similar with printed Bibles comparing it with Bible software: the software we have is painfully inferior in many regards (no fixed pagination, for example, though fixed pagination is great for memory). And that’s an area that I do intend to do something about… one of these years.
There are many marvellous things about our technology now; but there were many marvellous things about what came before as well, and we''re often losing those features (as well as not taking advantage of the full possibilities of our new technology, settling for third best because it’s easy to implement).
> “It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the ‘e,’ and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r.’ There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious.”[0]
[0] http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/32/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holm...
I think this is another tactile part of reading a novel: laying in bed balancing the book in your hand, holding the side you're not reading, then repositioning your hand when you start reading the right hand page.
http://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-handw...
I know not many people use handwritten letters any more, but this potentially gives this company a complete sample of your handwriting, which they can then use for whatever purpose they want.
It would actually be an interesting machine learning application not only to recognize letters from an actual sample (say a document in cursive writing), but also to understand how the letters connect and then create a cursive font based on that.
Just a thought, instead of having every ligature you could let a camera/tablet observe how you are writing certain "test sentences" and turn this data into autoencoder neural network that would turn any text into "your handwriting".
Wonder if I still have the old font file floating around anywhere.
I went through probably a dozen iterations, tweaking the spacing and alignment until it looked fairly natural. Now, I wonder if there was a way to automate that, or if the fonts created with this site take a little manual tweaking as a final polishing step.