My Text in Your Handwriting

Abstract

There are many scenarios where we wish to imitate a specific author's pen-on-paper handwriting style. Rendering new text in someone's handwriting is difficult because natural handwriting is highly variable, yet follows both intentional and involuntary structure that makes a person's style self-consistent. We present an algorithm that renders a desired input string in an author's handwriting. An annotated sample of the author's handwriting is required; the system is flexible enough that historical documents can usually be used with only a little extra effort. Experiments show that our glyph-centric approach, with learned parameters for spacing, line thickness, and pressure, produces novel images of handwriting that look hand-made to casual observers, even when printed on paper.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

My Text in Your Handwriting. Tom S. F. Haines, Oisin Mac Aodha, Gabriel J. Brostow. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2016.Tom S. F. Haines, Oisin Mac Aodha, and Gabriel J. Brostow. My text in your handwriting. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 35(3):26:1–26:18, May 2016.Haines, T. S. F., Mac Aodha, O., and Brostow, G. J. 2016. My text in your handwriting. ACM Transactions on Graphics 35, 3 (May), 26:1–26:18.T. S. F. Haines, O. Mac Aodha, and G. J. Brostow, “My text in your handwriting,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 26:1–26:18, May 2016. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/2886099 PDF (14.2 MB) PDF and Suppl. Material (38.8 MB) BibTeX External Project Page (data, source code and videos) DOI

Acknowledgments

Project supported by EPSRC grants EP/J021458/1, EP/K023578/1, and CR-PLAY EU project #611089. We would like to thank Aindri, Bryan, and Melissa Terras, and the reviewers for their kind assistance.