Show HN: Handwriter.ttf – Handwriting Synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM

I bet this is what people felt when JavaScript was first demoed on the web.

In the year 2077, when each font will run it's own virtual machine on WASM containing a "minimal" Ubuntu image, some enlightened blogger will suggest server side rendered fonts as a performance improvement.

Nice demo.

Without trying to steal the thread, what I would care is actually the opposite direction.

Neither in Swift Playgrounds, nor in any other programming development environment apps for both mobile OSes, have I found a good development experience using pen instead of keyboard.

Given how many of us "program" in paper notebooks, it is quite incredible that besides a couple of research projects done by PhD students, no one cares to actually make it more widespread in a usable way.

I've read the README and watched the video, but I'm still not sure what this is doing? I know it can "synthesize [a] font at runtime", so does that mean it's creating a random handwritten font as you type? But it's not based on the user's handwriting?

This looks like it'd be quite useful for faking documents more convincingly. Existing handwriting fonts always have tell-tale regularities and there's so few that forensics analysis exposes them easily.

I wonder what makes SIMD an improvement here - in the end it all boils down to TTF bytecode and I don't think this comes with SIMD instructions, right?

I wondered why there's just a video and no demo. But does it require the new wasm features in the browser ttf support?

Wtf is happening here what are the inputs and outputs? Hard to tell what this program does for me

this is amazing! i'm guessing you can probably get it to antialias without much more work

as the demo video shows, it's probably not something you want to have in between you and the ability to scroll a web page or close a tab. but i guess using harfbuzz now means we're buying into a turing-complete virtual machine running an arbitrary program in order to display a glyph. how seriously crippled are the harfbuzzless rendering paths? i'm assuming opting out of harfbuzz means opting out of arabic, devanagari and other indic scripts, etc.? is there a less out-of-control alternative that doesn't leave two billion people out in the cold?

So you trained a THAT small RNN to make this good handwriting? I'm actually even more impressed at that than at the crazy pipeline turning it into a font in realtime.

Damn, this is impressive!

We built a WebGL text renderer with full CJK support using Harfbuzz for our production whiteboard web app. I thought that was complicated until now.

I've been curious about seeing if harfbuzz etc could help create a styled Elianscript font but not really sure where to start.

Fun hack. I bet Alex Graves never in a million years anticipated that his PhD thesis work would be encapsulated in a novelty font.

I don't get it, why there's no link to a GitHub pages website to test the thing?

OP's repository has a Makefile which assumes a docker daemon is available.

It visually fails to preserve “handedness.”

Nice demo, for sure a fun app.

Link to llama.ttf, another fun font that abuses HarfBuzz for anyone interested (it runs a language model inside a font): https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/

The llama.ttf video does a pretty good job explaining what the heck is going on

Year 2045: fonts become self-aware and go on a strikethrough.

This is so cursed, there is so much that begs the question - "why?"...

I love it.

I can't wait for the next beautiful nightmare. Maybe someone should mix font rendering with PDF rendering. Of course, with a LLM doing something in the middle.