Intelligent Font Analyzer of the Your Handwriting II program

Recently we purchased a copy of a program named Your Handwriting II.

I make fonts with Font Creator 5.0, available from the http://www.high-logic.com webspace, and know that I could make a handwriting font using it and have indeed done so.

What interested me about the Your Handwriting II program and which was the factor which led to the purchase was the following in the email offering the package.

Create your font using only six handwritten letters and the Intelligent Font Analyzer

Now, in order to use the program one needs access to a printer and a scanner. The idea is that one prints out a form, then writes letters in the boxes, then scans it in. One can export a bmp file of the scan from the program and one can import a previously exported bmp.

As it happens, there is a problem with the printer here and the scanner is not attached, so I cannot use the program as intended at this time.

However, what I have wanted to do all along is to produce the handwriting using the Microsoft Paint program and then use the Your Handwriting II program to try to produce a font using the Intelligent Font Analyzer facility, which is only part of the program.

Thus, I am writing to ask if anyone who has the Your Handwriting II program could possibly print out the IFA form and then scan it in, either blank or with an example drawn as desired, and then export it as a bmp and then make it available on the web please, perhaps as an attachment to this thread. If the size of the bmp is a problem, then a gif would be fine as I could download that and then make a bmp from that without any of the information of the original bmp having been lost.

Hopefully I could then try the program to produce a few fonts using the Intelligent Font Analyzer using some bmp files produced by adapting the specimen bmp using Microsoft Paint.

I searched on the web for Intelligent Font Analyzer and found the following, amongst others.

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/fonte...andwriting.htm

Clicking on Read Full Review led to the following.

http://desktoppub.about.com/library/...ndwriting2.htm

I did have some problems getting the Your Handwriting II program to run on this Windows 98 PC. It said that it needed access to GDIPLUS.DLL and stopped. However, I was able to obtain a copy of GDIPLUS.DLL from the internet and tried putting it in C:WINDOWS and the program then ran. I have since seen this problem with the program documented on the internet. There was also another problem documented but that did not apply here as we are using Windows 98.

http://www.phoenixglobalsoftware.co....ng_support.asp

Readers might like to have a copy of each of the following fonts which I produced using the Font Creator 5.0 program.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/10000.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/10000OUT.TTF

I am thinking that they might look good in use with two Serif fonts, namely Invite SF (hans.ttf) and Invite Engraved SF (hansb.ttf) so as to produce an Art Deco look.

William Overington

10 March 2006

I tried the 10000 font with Invite SF and Invite Engraved SF.

The result is attached.

William

William,

Apologies for the delayed response to your request, but I had previously encountered problems when trying to install YH2 on this system and have only now looked for (and quickly found) a simple workaround. The attached .zip file contains the IFA sheet printed to PDF and a snapshot of the PDF saved in .bmp format at 300 dpi.

I hope this is what you were looking for, but please don't hesitate to let me know (either via this thread or by email) if I can be of any further assistance.

Alfred

Thank you for your posting.

I only found it this morning, less than an hour ago.

It is exactly what I wanted. Having downloaded and unzipped the attachment and read the pdf document, I opened the bmp in Microsoft Paint, saved a copy as IFA-Sheet2.bmp and then drew some characters in some of the boxes and saved.

The Your Handwriting II program accepted the file as an import and I was able to proceed and produce a test font named Unicorn Script.

Thank you for your help.

William

William,

I'm glad you found my post and found it helpful. I look forward to seeing samples of your Unicorn Script if you'd care to post them here.

Because of the lengthy gap between your posting and mine, and the lack of an automatic "new post" notification system on these forums, I tried to email you a few days ago but received a failure notice from your ISP's Mail Delivery System, as follows:

  A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
  recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

    WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk
      mailbox is full

I don't know if you have emptied your mailbox in the interim.

Alfred

> I'm glad you found my post and found it helpful. I look forward to seeing samples of your Unicorn Script if you'd care to post them here.

I do have a number of fonts available at the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm

These fonts were not made using Your Handwriting II but by using Font Creator 5.0 from http://www.high-logic.com though some are using artwork which was produced using the Softy program, which is a fontmaking program which I used before getting Font Creator.

Some are shareware, though they are all free for many people: I just thought that if a business uses them then the business is, well, in business.

There are also some earlier fonts still available.

[url]http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font7001.htm]

There are also some fonts produced using the Alphabet Synthesis Machine. It was reading about the Alphabet Synthesis Machine and Bézier curves which got me interested in fontmaking.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font0000.htm

> I don't know if you have emptied your mailbox in the interim.

Actually, no. We have had the Globalnet facility since the late 1990s. The email is rarely used now, largely only if I need to give an email address and receive an email and then reply in order to register for some web facility. However, we keep the account going because we have found the 100 Megabytes of free webspace that comes with it (about 37 Megabytes in use at present) to be very reliable and does not have adverts on it, so the account is worth it just to have a reliable webspace.

The problem is the amount of spam that arrives, even with the spam filter on. It fills the mailbox and I found that I was having to spend time every day clearing it all out and, frankly, I just got fed up doing it. I used to clear the mailbox every day, then one day I didn't do it and I have only rarely cleared it out since! Sorry that the mailbox was full when you kindly wrote to me.

On the matter of fonts, some time ago I produced a small web-based exhibition which is still on the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ng...csandfonts.htm

As I take care about copyright issues each of the fonts featured in the exhibition is either one supplied by Serif, either with Page Plus 9 or some other Serif package, or is one of my own fonts. The one big benefit of making one's own fonts is that one owns the copyright! So I can embed them in pdfs and say that they can be broadcast on interactive television channels and add whatever characters I choose into them!

William

> I look forward to seeing samples of your Unicorn Script if you'd care to post them here.

I have now produced a document unicorn.PDF which shows the font.

One thing I did notice about the program is that it asks for a name for the font then produces a postscript name for the font without taking out any spaces from the name of the font. As I understand it, postscript names do not have spaces in them, so maybe when using Your handwriting II, when providing the response to the request for a name for the font it is best not to have any spaces in that name. It appears that the program uses the provided letters directly and then adapts one of a number of font designs provided by the program to provide a best fit for the other characters. For Unicorn Script, I think that I had the designs too thin.

It is an interesting program.

William

[themathprof]

It's over 6 years but I just found this program (yourHANDWRITING 2.0) that I bought many years ago and I'm trying to figure it out.
I seem to be able to copy a character from a windows font (on lower left side of window) to the MyFonts (upper left) dbg01 (for example) but when I try to save the result a popup tells me that it can not be save "on your system."
I saw in a google search that there was an xp patch (I'm using windows 7 and the program is in Program Files x86.
So my question is: Instead of using the forms and scanning them in, can I just use one of the dbg fonts found
in the MyFonts drop down list and add or replace characters from a Windows font?