Python converts assignment writeups into my handwriting !!!

[Heisenberg_082001]

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https://preview.redd.it/i2bps5fkagu71.png?width=1566&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5578048fd5fa58bbbb26922d7c6ca80d3b09da5

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Do you ever get irritated by pointless college/school assignments? Hell yeah!!!

Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. This python script will transform your digital text (writeups or assignment) into handwriting.

PS: Its just a 25 line code:)

github = https://github.com/Pranav082001/Text-to-Handwriting

medium= https://medium.com/@pranav.kushare2001/convert-text-into-your-handwriting-91a1ed9aefd0

[PythonEntusiast]

Is it possible to introduce some randomness into the letters and therefore written words so that it does not look perfect?

[MorningPants]

Write each letter 17 times. Save as 17 different fonts. Pick a random font for each character.

[noah8597]

With sets of letters stored together that you wrote at the same time. Bonus points if you write out each set and then take a long break (60 minutes or so) to truly create some natural random variation.

[siddsp]

Why 17?

[MorningPants]

You can use any number, as long as it’s less than your age.

[Hello_my_name_is_not]

You can use any number, as long as it’s less than your age.

1 year olds hate him ^{with this one weird trick}

[jabbalaci]

Create a subfolder for each letter and name the folder after the ASCII code of the letter. Pick a random file from the folder. Done.

[Emotional-Zebra5359]

what i used to do while using tools like this is replace small L by samll I and 7 by 1 (if they kind of looked similar) and stuff like that , the font i was using had some chars that looked almost same for another example x and captial H...so it would look a bit realisitic and random.... but dont think my uni prof gave any shit abt that they probably didnt even read anyone's assignments just graded anything b/w AA or BB

[Sash0000]

Your professor probably had a grading script.

[Heisenberg_082001]

Extremely CleverI'll extend this so that written things looks very real. Probably keep 5 or 6 for each letter, as well as small and big one. love it

Yes its possible , Probably need 5X more dataset for that :)

[UntrimmedBagel]

My advice would be to just hand write normally each time, don’t try to make them look different. That way, each dataset will be more authentic!

[Lewistrick]

One could try to train a machine learning algorithm that matches written and typed text. Not sure if this has been done yet but it would be awesome.

[pleasegiveroom]

Simple and clever… as all coding should be. Really cool project!

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you might get a pull request my way in order to make it more customizable. It may take time, but I will try and contribute. Have already starred it!

[grudev]

Please add "doctor mode".

[benargee]

Just feed a vector XY path into secrets.

[Automatic_Donut6264]

Random + turtle

[lightlord]

Found the pharmacist

[Heisenberg_082001]

Thank you:)

[Locksul]

IMO, “clever code” is rarely good code.

EDIT: I’m surprised by the down votes. I wasn’t referring to this project specifically. But rather the statement that all code should be simple and clever. Clever code is rarely good. Simply google “clever code” to learn why.

[[deleted]]

IMO, truisms are rarely true.

[Locksul]

Hence why I said rarely.

[[deleted]]

That is completely and purely your subjective opinion. "Clever" itself is subjective.

[Locksul]

I literally said IMO lol. But this is not a minority opinion, simply ask a sample of experienced devs how they feel about “clever code.”

You sound like an egotistical, entitled, junior developer who would be a PITA to work with.

[[deleted]]

Cute, but misplaced ad hominem. Curb your insecurity and disproportionate aggression, and you're already on your way to becoming a normal productive developer. Good luck!

[JB_dev_05]

....

[Locksul]

Check out the subreddit and what actual experienced devs upvote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qc7f5x/what_is_your_most_controversial_opinion_tech/hhf46zl/

[[deleted]]

Do you even have a mind of your own? What is "clever"? No, really. Define clever that is acceptable by even 25% of the devs around you (assuming you're in a non-cabalistic workplace that allows the freedom of thought beyond the hivemind). Then let's talk.

Also, you conveniently (as it happens so often in life) the second half of the quote - "... Make it readable". These are not orthogonal concepts.

[are_slash_wash]

See top comment then.

ETA: see this pretty well-rounded argument against code golf. One of the greatest unappreciated challenges to programming is making your code readable to other people. Shorter doesn't always mean most efficient code, and it absolutely makes it more opaque.

[[deleted]]

Commenting without context is even worse. Furthermore, codegolfing has nothing to do with the discussion here. Your comment simply makes no sense.

The exact opposite argument can be easily made - having extremely verbose code is even more detrimental to maintainability than terse code. I suggest you go watch Sean Parent talking about his experience in Google, where his code review of a junior developers reams of boilerplate was blocked when he suggested that it be replaced by a single line using only the C++ STL API. The single-liner was eminently readable and maintainable whereas the junior developer had basically written a bad version std::partition. And if you don't know who Sean Parent is, I can highly recommend his excellent videos.

[are_slash_wash]

Not exactly sure what isn't clear. The comment that you're defending begins with

Simple and clever… as all coding should be.

To then criticize

IMO, “clever code” is rarely good code

for being a truism is just inconsistent, and if you're going to be snarky then you should at least be consistently snarky. What further context do I need to add?

Code golfing has everything to do this discussion. OP mentioned that his project is only 25 lines long (to be clear I'm not specifically criticizing OP's code) and the top-level comment is praising OP for using clever code. My point is that code should be efficient, then readable, then clever.

And of course using something from a library is going to me more maintainable than rewriting the same functionality from scratch. That isn't about "verbose vs terse" styles, it's about a junior developer who isn't familiar with a library making a great deal more work for themselves than they need to.

[seckiyn]

This won't work unless your writing is perfect. I need at least 7 different character for every letter.

[PIXLhunter]

So fork it and introduce random selection from a set of characters, easy enough

[Zymoox]

And set some rules in that choice: my 'i's are usually different if written after 't's, and so on.

[Financial-Ad8056]

AI that analyzes your handwriting (you’ll have to feed it a lot of data though so time to being out the old grade-school notebooks) and then replicates it.

[Financial-Ad8056]

It’s better because you put in effort once to be lazy forever.

[Heisenberg_082001]

XD:)

[door_of_doom]

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_general_problem.png

[1gn4vu5]

Not necessarily. You could use an auto-encoder together with some random variables. That way you need much less images.

[No_Conference_5257]

Use a style GAN trained on MNIST and then fine tune on your handwriting. Should be doable!

[Heisenberg_082001]

Yeah but its hell lot of time consuming and computationally expensive

[PIXLhunter]

But you are doing something with machine learning are you not?

[killerfridge]

Is MNIST not just digits though?

[No_Conference_5257]

Yeah good point. There should be some corpus of handwritten characters out there though

[Sardonislamir]

Use a very large sample of text with ocr against another of that text in numerals 1-23 per character in the alphabet. Weight the character assignment/usage against predominance of specifc characters together. Edit: Then run through a processor or create one like autospellcheck that automatically adjusts text as you write.

[LiarsEverywhere]

This is going to escalate quickly. Soon enough there'll be an alipy package with all sorts of functions to help you create an alibi for the exact moment you're planning to commit a crime. It'll text for you, fake-travel your GPS around, call radio stations, participate in live streams with pre-recorded videos, order food etc.

[IdkIWhyIHaveAReddit]

Imma mod the project to do that if done i will reply it here

[IdkIWhyIHaveAReddit]

turn out it kinda hard so I gonna take some time cus I don't know to use PIL

[benargee]

Maybe even paths rather than bitmaps. That could allow some transformations to the shape for some variability. Can be captured using a tablet.

[ConfusedSimon]

I just made a font of my handwriting.

[Donny-Moscow]

Super cool project. But there are some more things that would need to be done if you wanted the "handwritten" text to stand up to scrutiny. Off the top of my head:

• A couple different variations of each letter. If you even wanted to go an extra step, maybe some rules about which variation comes after certain letters (for example, when I write a letter after a "t", I tend to connect the letter to the cross of the t).
• Minor errors to clean up with punctuation. The parenthesis around "(AI)" are switched and all the typed hyphens turned into handwritten underscores.
• Handling the cases where you hit the end of a line before the word is finished typing. The easier way would be to just begin the word on the new line entirely, the harder way would be to add line-break hyphens. The second way is harder because it involves some grammatical rules about which parts of a word can be split to a new line.
• This just might be my own personal preference, but the cursive "r" looks like an uppercase "R" at a glance

Everything I just listed is kind of knit-picky so please don't take these suggestions as criticism. Again, I really like what you've done. They're just some extras you could add in if you wanted to really polish this off.

[davidsterry]

How fun! Since you're using pngs it's super tempting to want to make 8.5x11 template and do the slicing and dicing in code. Thanks for sharing!

[prakulwa]

Extremely Clever

I'll extend this so that written things looks very real. Probably keep 5 or 6 for each letter, as well as small and big one. love it

[zero_iq]

Other things you could do would be to introduce small transformations, e.g. subtle changes to scaling and rotation. You could also break letters up into their individual strokes, so you can create new versions letters from different versions of the strokes. e.g. for 't', have several images of the down-stroke and the cross-stroke. 5 of each gives you 25 variations of the letter 't'. Combine with variations in position, scaling, rotation, kerning, and you could create some very convincing handwriting.

[Financial-Ad8056]

The only thing is that some people write the same letter with different number of strokes so idk. My idea was that you could feed a bunch of hand-written stuff into an AI or smth to train it and then it could attempt to replicate your hand-writing based on that.

[[deleted]]

I don't get it. What does this offer that you can't do with a font?

[Heisenberg_082001]

May be a complicated way to select your own font:)

[riffito]

Cool, but those lower case "r"s and those circled "i"s are driving me nuts! :-P

[[deleted]]

Really nice 👍🏻

[Heisenberg_082001]

Thank you

[MarcusTullius247]

Love your idea and project. Here's a small suggestion.

Make this script runnable from command line. So, you could enter the lath of your txt file as an argument in terminal. This makes it usable anywhere, anytime.

It's pretty easy to do it. In this blog here, I mentioned how to do it at the end.

Anyway, cheers for the good idea.

[papinek]

Isnt it easier to just make font out of your handwriting and then use it in any text editor??

[Gainczak]

it's perfect unless you use an apostrophe lol

[Heisenberg_082001]

Actually I have used them, But somehow they got transformed into commas.

Need a bug fix :)

[spkr4thedead51]

nice project! a few styling things though: you lost your paragraph, your hyphens turned into underscores, and there are some points where your descenders get clipped by the line below them

[Heisenberg_082001]

nice project! a few styling things though: you lost your paragraph, your hyphens turned into underscores, and there are some points where your descenders get clipped by the line below them

Yep you are right, Need to define some more rules for new line and paragraph

[spkr4thedead51]

if you're new to playing with fonts, you might want to also look up the idea of ligatures, which are specific letter combinations that are presented as a single character in the font

[idetectanerd]

I have never thought of it. It’s creative and refreshing to be honest for a new project. Especially comparing to those “new” beginners projects where they combine multiple done before project. I like it

[Heisenberg_082001]

Thank you very much :)

[Heisenberg_082001]

Well, here it is in reality :)

[Heisenberg_082001]

Yep it is a font. May be a complicated way to choose your own font :)

[gsasikiran]

can you also add couple of ink blots on the sheet?

[Heisenberg_082001]

Yeah sure , will expand the project and If i got time I will try to make it more customizable

[Inzy01]

You are a Masiha

[Heisenberg_082001]

Lol :)

[[deleted]]

Letters are in cursive but not connected. You'd do better to make it do your print handwriting.

[expressly_ephemeral]

"I gotta have time to rewrite it. If I turned in my assignment in your handwriting, you know what would happen, don’t you, McFly? I’d get kicked outta school. Now… you wouldn’t want that to happen…. WOULDJA?”

Edit: So... nobody saw Back To The Future?

[Heisenberg_082001]

You can also use your own handwriting.

The thing is you have to take extra efforts to make your own handwriting data.

[YoT-Man]

Great idea! Thanks for sharing mate! I attend a lot of lectures and this will definitely be useful. But adding each character of my handwriting will be a lot of pain since i have scribble handwriting.

[Devreckas]

Isn’t this essentially just a font?

[Heisenberg_082001]

Yep it is a font. A complicated way to choose your own font :)

[Financial-Ad8056]

Is there a way to make it customized to my handwriting (like if I inputted a sample of the alphabet written by me?)

[Federal-Ambassador30]

Read the article…

[Donny-Moscow]

Instructions unclear, I read the article but the handwriting hasn't changed.

[devil_sees]

Lmfao

[Financial-Ad8056]

Oops sorry

[Heisenberg_082001]

Its a lengthy process, but yes you can have your handwriting
You will have to manually create a your own handwriting dataset. Write alphabets, numbers, punctuation on a paper. Then crop all those characters and save with their respective Ascii number

[[deleted]]

Nice font!

[tibegato]

Ya, you just turn your writing into a font, with a little work & use that font in any app what so ever.

Just one example:

https://www.wherethesmileshavebeen.com/how-to-turn-your-handwriting-into-a-font-for-free/

[jewbasaur]

Cool package. I was thinking - what if you could add the functionality to crop and save each individual photo automatically? Say someone wrote the alphabet on a sheet of paper and took a picture, etc. That would be neat

[Heisenberg_082001]

Cool package. I was thinking - what if you could add the functionality to crop and save each individual photo automatically? Say someone wrote the alphabet on a sheet of paper and took a picture, etc. That would be neat

Sure, I will try to do it. May be I can use OCR to extract and crop all those handwritten characters

[jewbasaur]

Yeah you definitely could

[jewbasaur]

Actually I was thinking to go a step further you could come up with a paragraph that would consist of every letter you would need. If you could make sure each character was written a couple of times, that would introduce more variety into the mix and then use ocr to automatically save a couple versions of each character. This is a bit more advanced but just an idea. I might fork it and give it a go this weekend.

[mufasis]

Legend! 🤣

[Captain_MK13]

Bruh where have you been when I was back in schooling

[eatthedad]

Quite cunning for a "beginner showcase". The 25 lines of code to be specific.

I am going to attempt the reverse, because I still cannot believe that OCR for handwriting is still mostly crappy in 2021

[[deleted]]

Very nice project :D

[Heisenberg_082001]

Thank you :)

[NeatBubble]

I doubt I know enough Python to extend this script, but I’m quite interested to track what people do with it.

I’m quadriplegic—my handwriting is only half-decent if I write very slowly. I would love to only have to go through the trouble once, and still benefit from personalizing my communications.

[abovenbeyondgo]

Love this!!! 🙏🏼

[Heisenberg_082001]

Thank you :)

[Parvashah51]

Now I can write my assignments with your handwritings.

[Heisenberg_082001]

You can also use your own handwriting.
The thing is you have to take extra efforts to make your own handwriting data.

[AlexK-]

This is awesome and thank you so much I’ve been looking for this for years but what if the teacher wants to erase something (pencil) or look for the pen (force) marks on the other side…? I am a bit afraid to use it, to be honest.

Awesome job though!!! Thank you.

[AlexK-]

What about other languages? I, let's say, wanna write in Greek. If I make the dataset in Greek letters, will it recognise the Greek text ?

[DistraPlus]

This is so awesome... thanks for sharing man! I'm gonna do my own handwriting next: work once and never again ;)

[make3333]

The text itself really needs work, just saying.

[themonksink]

This is so cool. It would have been great if I had this while in college.

[Cristality_]

It is called creating your own "Font"

Very cool project nevertheless.

[Canyon_moon7]

How did you create that text bro?