[iambateman]

I was about three years behind wallawe’s reply.

The technical parts are fun…the core thing for us was that it was actually written by a real pen. The difference between a print and real writing is obvious to most people, so we wanted it to be believable.

Our system used a set of handwritten fonts, along with a bunch of “fuzzing” of line height, line direction, and character swap outs. This created an SVG path that a robot used to trace with a pen.

The hardware and margins were what killed us. As wallawe noted, there’s still a lot of manual labor that goes into a system like this, even if the writing is automated. Envelope stuffing and card-envelope matching are big problems.

Its not a super competitive market yet, but the margins on what could be charged per card were pretty low, especially factoring in paper costs and labor costs.

[WalterBright]

> Our system used a set of handwritten fonts

What betrays handwritten fonts is nobody writes "a" the same way every time. I get that you're addressing this with fuzzing, but that's not enough. The pressure put on a pen also varies, people make mistakes and cross them out, there are ink blotches, etc.

[iambateman]

There were enough character alternates and special compound ligatures that it’s really hard to tell unless you know it’s machine-produced.

I think you would be surprised at how realistic it can be.

[WalterBright]

Perhaps. Just yesterday I received a handwritten note from a business. The varying pressure on the pen was clear if you ran a finger over it, as some areas were more deeply indented than others. The line thickness varied, sometimes trailing off into nothing. No two letters were the same, some were illegible in isolation. The lines would even overlap. Every ligature was different.

I've never seen a machine handwrite that way.

I'm sure they'll get better, but there's a long way to go.