Hand Writing
I'd like a plotter that can replicate my handwriting.
It'd be great to have this before 8/19 for birthday thankyous.
Plotter
There are lots of designs out there. This should be pretty straight forward. 2 steppers and a servo.
First steps are just to get the plotter working, just draw something - a box.
https://opensource.com/article/18/3/diy-plotter-arduino
Capture
- https://wiki.evilmadscientist.com/Capturing_Handwriting
- http://goinkscape.com/how-to-vectorize-in-inkscape/
- https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-centerline-trace
Cursive is tricky because it requires connecting the letters. Don't do that.
I'll write out all the letters, numbers and marks a few times on paper.
I'd like something to convert raster to vector. If I can't find that, it shouldn't take long to trace all of them.
Mostly Automated
This would make a good hackaday project.
User writes out letters in a grid and scans them. Input directory can include many scans. The UI tries to figure out the grid automatically by assuming approximately equal spacing and that most cells contains a character.
There are pages for letters and characters. A letter page goes L to R, T to B, A to Z. A letter page is either upper or lower case. Filling a 5x5 grid. For upper case, the first cell is empty, for lower case, the last cell is empty. For characters we do 0-9 then ,.?!()+-;:%$ with the cell after the numbers left empty. Having the user draw the grid should make it easy to find the boxes.
Could also use OCR (https://github.com/otiai10/gosseract) to just take a handwritten page with a bunch of letters and isolate and identify them.
Rather than trying to fully deduce a path, we'll start with assumed paths and evolve them to a best fit. This means that all the symbols need a "normal" form (for instance 4 has a triangle and a fork form). A latter improvement would be to add several base variants for each letter and do an evolutionary competition. I think this is a two step process. In the first step we just try to isolate a transform and line thickness. In the second step we actually move the bezier points.
Program
Takes text and randomly chooses a character for each. This way all the instances of a given letter don't look exactly the same.
It would also be cool if I could jitter the control points.
Book (Someday, maybe)
Essentially the same as CNC. Again - it would be really cool to do this with plain text (could couple it with book binding and make some "hand printed" books). Could also make custom notebooks. Basic wood, plastic or metal covers, drill small holes in the pages with a press and hold the notebooks together with screws.
Create a set of 2 plotters. Use a roll of paper (rather than sheets). The roll is fed into the first plotter. During the plotting, a line (or simply a dot) is placed along the leading edge. The roll then flips and leads into the second plotter (which will be 2-4 pages behind the first). The second plotter uses the mark (line or dot) from the first plotter to align itself and then fills out the back of the page. When a roll is complete, go through and cut along the edges. This system has the potential to plot pages, front and back, automatically. This would be great for the idea of 'hand-printed' books. "Plotter Paper" is 12"x300' for $22, 5¢ sheet - kind of pricey. Printer paper is 1¢ per page. A 1000'x36" is $75, we could do 4 pages at a time. That works out to just under 2¢ a page. Not bad.
Also - I could create a format for publishing. Something simple that is mostly plain text but allows me to define simple image layout, paragraph and page breaks.
Try using a laser instead of ink. 500mW should be enough, that would only be $7. If the laser was strong enough for cutting, that could be interesting. It would let me do dictionary style side tabs, answer covers for study sheets, perforations.