One of my obsessions in developing PlottyBot has been handwriting. Even with Mandalagaba I care very much that the penstrokes originate from one’s hand and avoid tools which “do the drawing for you”. This is where your personality transpires on paper beyond your ability to draw. I thought it’d be neat to have a pen plotter able to write in one’s handwriting.
This idea came up a long time ago, and I researched many ways to achieve it. The unfortunate but predictable conclusion was that I would need to write my own font format to get there.
Introducing Flexible Font. PlottyBot comes with the ability to capture your handwriting. The Flexible Font format is monoline based, holds metadata on your pen strokes to define where ligatures may occur, it also allows for character variations. It’s tailored just for plotters :).
The video bellow shows several ways to use PlottyBot with handwriting. The first is a simple live replay of pen strokes from https://plottybot.mandalagaba.com, the next ones use Flexible Font.
Fan bloody tastic! Is this something you might be releasing?
Jimmy, it depends which piece you’re talking about. All the handwriting stuff is part of PlottyBot. I suppose, if you wanted to just play with the handwriting capture without the plotter, that you could grab the PlottyBot Pi image, and either instantiate it on a Pi that isn’t attached to a pen plotter, or just grab the code and run it on your web server. The later would be a bit of work.