Handwriting

Cursive Handwriting Could Make Your Idiot Kid Smarter, Study Suggests

Get writing: a new study suggests that hand-penned cursive is better for learning than using a keyboard.

New Software Can Perfectly Forge Handwriting

You’re probably already overly-anxious about protecting your identity online, but researchers at the University College London don’t feel that’s enough to worry about. So they’ve developed new software that can perfectly replicate anyone’s handwriting—dead or alive—making it easy to forge signatures and notes. Past efforts to recreate someone’s handwriting usually result in a single font…

Can Your Terrible Chicken Scratch Break This Handwriting Algorithm?

I’m a writer, so I’ll always have a place in my heart for the handwritten page (partially because I believe in romantic ideas about writing, but also because there is no way I’m using my phone to type out anything beyond a few words). If there’s a way to combine handwriting and computer typing, I’d…

Wacom’s Digitizing Notebook Can Finally Convert Handwriting To Text

If you’re hesitant to give up pen and paper for all your note-taking needs, Wacom’s Bamboo Spark digitizing notebook has added another good reason to avoid a touchscreen stylus for a little while longer: handwriting to text conversion. This wasn’t a feature that was included when the $160 Bamboo Spark was first introduced. Notes jotted…

Incredible close up video shows how a ballpoint pen works

At the very tip of a ballpoint pen is, you guessed it, a ball that rolls around and basically stains the paper with ink. Imagine if you dipped your body in paint and then rolled around white carpet, that’s basically how writing instruments works. Here’s an incredibly up close angle of a ballpoint pen writing…

Watching a person write calligraphy is basically therapy

This whole short, Ink by Ryan Couldrey, focuses on Tanja Tiziana and the journey of rediscovering the long lost (okay, not quite long lost but soon/almost/eventually) art of calligraphy and just handwriting in general. Though dripping in a little too much ink at times, it’s always so nice to see someone write. The effect—hearing the…

Show Us Your Handwriting

For most of us, typing supplanted the pen and pencil years ago—nowadays, anything longer than a thank you note feels odd to write on real paper. Sadly, the keyboard is taking the great, weird eccentricities of handwriting with it. After all, your handwriting used to signify your personality, your education, it was something to be…

A Typeface That Represents Average Handwriting from Around the World

What would a typeface that combines the handwriting of people all around the world look like? Something like this, it turns out. Bic (as in the pens) is behind the effort, which you can add your own handwriting to right here. You can further check out the results to see the differences broken down into…

Bic Is Trying To Make a Font Based on All the World’s Handwriting

In yet another crushing blow to Comic Sans, pen-maker Bic is currently soliciting handwriting samples from anyone on Earth who wants to participate in its Universal Typeface Experiment. The goal is to create a universal font that will presumably supplant Comic Sans as the go-to typeface for amateur designers making birthday cards, lunch room signage,…

Google is adding handwriting input to Gmail and Docs. Starting today, you can use your trackpad or mouse to hand-draw characters in a variety of languages. [Gmail Blog via 9to5Google]

This Robot Can Write All the Thank You Notes You’re Too Lazy To Send

It’s good form to send a thank you note when given a gift, but how many of us ever really manage to find the time to do so? A New York company called Bond Gifts assumes very few of us, so it’s created an app-powered robot with perfect penmanship that can hand write a thank…

This App Lets You Send Handwritten Greeting Cards Right From Your Phone

In a world of texts and emails, handwritten notes are getting rarer and rare because they require that heinous thing called “effort.” Or at least they used to. A new iOS app called Inkly takes almost all the work out of it, except for the actual writing part. The process is easy, way easier than…

Is Handwriting Dead?

These days, virtually all of our personal communication is performed digitally or over the phone. We type emails, compose tweets, blurt out status updates, spit out instant messages, make phone calls… and not a single bit of it is handwritten. Of course, we might make notes or lists for ourselves—but increasingly, even they’re replaced by…

New Device Turns Eye Movement Into Handwriting

I always dreamed about being able to write or draw with no hands, using just my eyes. This new device invented by Dr. Jean Lorenceau at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris would allow me to do exactly that. Magic? Science! The system is already working. Lorenceau and his patients are using it to handwrite…

Nobody Writes Anything Anymore, Says Study

Have any of you picked up a pen and paper to scrawl some note or jot down a quick to do list only to find your hand muscles have gone slack and your once-clear, familiar handwriting now crooked and forced? I have. Sometimes. It’s really rather sad. The results of a study commissioned by the…

First-Grader With No Hands Wins National Handwriting Award

This is Annie Clark. She’s only seven, and sadly she was born without hands. But that doesn’t seem to pose much of a problem for her, because she’s just won a national penmanship award. A handwriting award. Without hands. Annie managed to write her way to victory in the content that was held at Wilson…

How the Pen Evolved from a Humble Paintbrush Into a Precise Instrument of Writing Perfection

Yeah, you can buy those blue Bic pens in bulk if you want—a boatload costs about as much as your morning coffee. And all pens are pretty much the same, right? Of course not. Cheapo pens are much more likely to leave ink smeared across your nose, bleeding through your pants pocket, or glopping up…

Computers Are Killing the Beauty of Cursive

“These kids are losing time where they create beauty every day,” Professor Christen said. “But it’s hard for me to make a practical argument for it. I’m not one who’s mourning it because of that; I’m mourning the beauty, the aesthetics.” [NYT]

The Fastest Text Input Test: Laptop, iPhone, Pen, Palm, or Newton?

In this totally unscientific but reasonably fair test, one man writes a long paragraph on several different devices (including pen and paper) to test speed. The results may surprise and anger you. The contestants: MacBook (unibody), pen and paper, iPhone (portrait), Apple Newton, Palm Treo 650 (hardware QWERTY), and Palm VX (Graffiti handwriting recognition software).…

Next-Gen Audi A8 Includes Handwriting Recognition, Bafflingly

Think texting while driving is dangerous? How about leaning over to the center console to scrawl “NEAREST BATHROOM!!!!!” on your car’s navigation system with a stylus? Audi’s next-gen A8 includes handwriting recognition to make that dangerous dream a dangerous reality. https://gizmodo.com/youre-23-times-more-likely-to-crash-your-car-if-youre-t-5324018 We don’t know much about the feature, integrated into Audi’s MMI navigation system, partly…