Sacha Chua has perpetrated a truly wonderful hack. She’s built a font based on her handwriting. She’s using it for blog post titles and a few other places on her website, so take a look there to see what it looks like.
The reason I really like her project is because it’s such a great example of software engineering. Think for a moment how you would do it. You want to take examples of your printing and turn it into a font. I, for one, would have no idea where to start. I’d probably think of something like Knuth’s Metafont but it’s not clear how to proceed from there or even if it’s the right tool. Like me, Chua has no experience with typography but using open source tools she came up with a very nice looking font. It’s much more than throwing together a bunch of pictures of letters to make a monospace font—most of us could probably do that. Her result is a proportional font complete with kerning.
Another great thing about her project is she did it in a literal way by using Org mode and code blocks to write and document her code. You can see that code here. Of course, she also did a lot of hand tweaking to get things just right. Doubtless her artistic talents were a big help there.
Most of us probably don’t need a “handwriting font” but it’s a great hack and definitely worth talking a look at.