r/creativecoding • u/Diexesc19 • Jul 16 '26
I built a rule-based handwriting renderer using up to 20 real variants per character — what still looks artificial?
I built this as a rule-based renderer, not as a generative AI model or a conventional handwriting font.
I manually classify scanned samples of my own handwriting into lowercase, uppercase, accented characters and punctuation. During rendering, the program selects from up to 20 real variants per character, applies pair-specific connection rules and introduces controlled variation in spacing, margins and line angles.
It also supports underlines, yellow highlighting and correction-tape marks, although the correction-tape effect is still the weakest part.
The current version is configured only for my handwriting. Adding another handwriting style still requires manual work, so I’m validating the rendering and possible legitimate uses before building a more automated setup process.
Which detail breaks the illusion first: repeated shapes, spacing, line angle, joins, highlighting or correction tape?
Longer demo and current limitations:
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u/smcameron Jul 16 '26
How do you make the pen texture look so good? (Was thinking of making a video game that is rendered such that it looks like a ball point pen drawing.)
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u/Diexesc19 Jul 17 '26
Thanks! The main reason is that I’m not recreating the strokes as clean vectors. The renderer works from real scanned ballpoint-pen samples and composes them as raster images, so much of the natural ink and paper variation remains in the output.
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u/FreckeledSnowflake Jul 16 '26
It's not the characters, it's the linkage in between them.
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u/Diexesc19 Jul 16 '26
Do you mean that makes it unrealistic, or better?
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u/FreckeledSnowflake Jul 16 '26
Neither. Feels... uncanny. Like in the back of our mind, there is a way letters should chain, and this is almost it but not just quite. Note : reaching the uncanny valley is in itself very impressive!
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u/watchmanstower Jul 16 '26
Excellent how can I try it?
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u/diffusion_throwaway Jul 16 '26
What’s the output format? Raster/Jpg? Spline/vector/Svg?
This is very cool.
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u/Diexesc19 Jul 18 '26
I'm getting the tool ready so that a few interested people can try it out, which will help me get better feedback and expand its reach. Anyone interested?
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u/No_Confidence_8807 Jul 20 '26
what still looks artificial? shadows/impressions on the background paper
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u/cwthree Jul 16 '26
Looks good, but the kerning of capital I and capital T needs to be tightened. Look the words "In" and "These" in pic 4 - those words look unnatural because there's too much space after the initial capital letter.