Fair Copy

Fair Copy

No font is made here, and none is edited. Every character on this sheet is the one your browser already has — Mincho, Gothic, an old-style Antiqua, a typewriter face — printed once into a small buffer at twice the size it will be used at. What happens next is everything a hand does to a letter it learned from a copybook.

Each glyph is blurred into a soft field, and the outline you see is not the typeface’s outline: it is the contour where that field crosses a threshold. Move the threshold down and the stroke swells, move it up and the stroke starves — and because the threshold is not a single number but a slow noise field across the character, one stroke can be pressed hard while the next one lifts. That is the whole trick behind Weight and Pressure. Before the threshold is read, the sampling point is displaced by two octaves of smooth noise: a broad drift that leans the letter away from its own model, and a finer wander along the edge. Tremor is how far it moves, Grain is how tight the wander is.

Then the letter is set down. It gets its own turn about its middle, its own width and height, its own error above or below the line, and its own gap to the character before it — all drawn from one seeded bell curve per character position, so the same word never comes out twice the same way. Repeated letters are written three times over, and the three versions are dealt out along the line, which is why the two ts in type are not the same t.

The paper is not a background. The rules are the ones a penmanship sheet gives you — a line to sit on and a broken line to aim the middle at, or, in vertical mode, a manuscript frame with a dotted rule down each column. Turn on Model and the printed form of every character appears faintly underneath exactly where the pen was aimed, so you can see the distance between the type and the hand. The slug along the bottom is the sheet’s own record: which face, which ink, the seed, how many glyphs went down.

Control	Effect
Text to write	Anything up to 400 characters, in any script your system has a face for; line breaks are kept
Specimen	Four standard specimen texts — an English sentence, a pangram with figures, the iroha in kana, a line of kanji
Base type	The printed form the hand is copying from. Mincho gives brush-cut serifs to break down; Typewriter starts almost broken already
Ink	Sumi black, an iron-gall blue black, vermilion, sepia. Ink multiplies onto the paper, so crossings darken
Direction	Horizontal on ruled lines, or vertical in right-to-left columns on a manuscript grid
Rules · Model	Show the ruled guides; show the printed type faintly beneath the writing
Size · Line	Writing size, as a fraction of the sheet, and how far apart the lines or columns sit
Slant	Mean lean of every character, −18° to +18°. A left-leaning hand is rarer and reads as left-handed
Waver	How much each character turns off that mean lean on its own
Size drift	Per-character size error — the difference between a practised hand and a tired one
Baseline	How far characters ride above or below the line they were meant to sit on
Tracking · Rhythm	Mean letter gap, and how unevenly that gap is kept from letter to letter
Tremor	How far the outline wanders from the printed form. At zero you are looking at plain type
Grain	Wavelength of that wander: low is a slow sag in the whole letter, high is a shaky line
Weight	Where the threshold sits — a starved hairline at one end, a flooded brush at the other
Pressure	How much the weight varies within one character, so some strokes bear down and others lift
Flow	Overall ink density, from a nearly dry pen to a fully loaded one
Bleed	Halo of ink soaking outwards into the paper around every stroke
Dry	Streaks of missed ink, running along the direction of writing
Random hand	Deals a fresh set of every hand and pen control, within ranges that still read as writing
Write it again	Keeps the settings, changes the seed: the same hand copying the same text a second time
Save sheet	Writes the sheet, rules and slug and all, to a PNG at twice the size

The pen controls are the expensive ones — they send every character back to be drawn again — so while one of them is moving each character is written once instead of three times over, and letting go writes the sheet out in full. The hand controls only move letters that have already been drawn, and cost nothing.