Text-to-Handwriting

In 2021, despite classes being online, we often still got handwritten assignments. The tools available online were very easy to identify as fake, so I built my own.

I hand-wrote every character about 10 times on a tablet, so no two letters looked the same. At generation time, the tool went through the text one character at a time. For each one, it picked a random version, rotated and resized it slightly, and placed it on a paper background. I added noise and lowered the quality to make the page look photographed.

Each page took a minute to generate, with no optimization. But the pages looked like photos of real handwriting.

This was my first real software project, and it got me excited to work with software for the rest of my life, even though I made it with very little understanding of how a computer worked or how to write programs.

In 2023, I built a React frontend for it while learning React. Looking at it now, the website was pretty bad.

to love working with software.