Multiple renditions of a handwritten font, and javascript that changes each letter with a different rendition at random in order to diversify handwritten type.
I love handwritten type. I've been greatly influenced by James Victore's work, it's bold, unique, and expressive. This is very difficult to replicate on the computer with a font because the repetitive nature of each letter stands out more when it has any sort of character. I've used myscriptfont.com in the past to create a handwritten font, and it didn't have that human element of each letter being different.
I've fixed this problem by creating multiple of the same font (my own handwriting), and creating a javascript library that changes the font of every character in a body of text.
So I created handwritten 3 fonts using myscriptfont.com. Each font is only caps, so lowercase letters are also uppercase. This means I have a font with 6 different versions of each letter. With the one font file (ttf or otf) I could create the rest of the necessary web fonts using a service like font2web.com. This gave me all of my a couple of copies of single handwritten font.
I created a simple query library I'm calling "jquery.diverse-fonts.js" it works by applying the attributes below to a html tag that you want to change.
data-fonts="thomasreggi1, thomasreggi2, thomasreggi3"
data-mix-case
The script currently picks a random font for each letter.
- Not use the same font twice in a row.
- Not use the same font for the same next use of a letter.