Handwriting

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:30:00 +1200

I wanted the English notes on the grimmerie to be handwritten, but my early attempts at using AI didn’t work out so well. Most attempts just fell back to use a script font. The image generating AIs are mostly worse. That’s where you get the recognisable garbled text.

I did stumble upon a site that came close, calligrapher.ai. I have no idea who runs this site, it’s basically entirely bare, you give it some text, adjust a few knobs, and it spits out an SVG. It doesn’t appear to be an LLM, it looks more like a small set of randomised letters, but the results are nice, certainly better than if I tried to write it myself.

Edit: Ok it turns out it’s not randomised letters, but an RNN.¹ Essentially, it was trained on real handwriting samples and uses past pen strokes to be part of the input for the next stroke (that’s how the letters always connect appropriately). Hats off (and thank you) to whoever built this handy site.

Recurrent Neural Network — a type of neural network designed for sequential data. Unlike a regular neural network that processes each input independently, an RNN maintains a hidden “state” that gets updated at each step, so each output depends on both the current input and what came before. ↩︎

Ai-Tools on The Curtain Must Rise

Handwriting