[oliwarner]

Indeed. Scan a book in public domain, feed into an online font generation service, pay somebody to clean it up.

A few hours later, you have a font you can use how you like. Is it as good? Probably not, but it's much cheaper.

Edit: oh look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46127400

[dryark]

Yes. I did see that other article. No the process we are using is not using AI. We are not using OCR either. We are using computational geometry and forensics methodology. No flatbed scanners. No sheet fed scanners.

This isn't like anything ever done before. It's entirely different and higher quality than any result you can get through AI or OCR.

I do agree that detailed work is required to do it correctly and produced high quality results. I'm not offhandedly saying "just do these simple things and bam perfection."

[flutteringfool]

Wow that sounds incredible. I'm super into fonts, I understand the proprietary nature but if OCR isn't used and neither is flatbed scanning, does that mean the 3D model is obtained? I can't think of another method.

It's very cool, would love to see some fonts you have available whenever it's out!

[dryark]

The initial input is high resolution images using a DSLR and a macro lens, or at least it will be soon. Initial testing of the method has been done using 200mp images taken casually with a standard modern cell phone.

The underlying new computational geometry method can be extended to 3d but that isn't necessary for this application unless we also extract a 3d image of the page itself. For now at least we are not doing that as it would be even more complicated and finicky. Possibly for soft enough pages the letterpress imprint will deform the page enough that the deformation can be detected and help figure out where the original metal pressed and where the ink is due to page bleed.

Essentially what we are doing is taking high resolution photos, using computational geometry methods on those to extract the shapes, and then refining those shapes through a mixture of automation and manual labor.

The entire thing is called "Donkey Free" and will have information online in the near future. I just bought the domain ( donkeyfree.com ) for this 2 days ago; this is all extremely new. I'd like to release the resulting fonts under a license allowing free use for many purposes but we still need to think through that to figure out how to make that sustainable.

[flutteringfool]

Sounds great, best of luck! Hope you make a Show HN post when it's ready