[croisillon]

I believe you can work on your handwriting the same way you work on drawing.

I learned to write pretty much by myself after my parents taught me to read and I didn't practice the m's and the o's exercises in 1st class (since I already _could_ write). This ended up in a horrible handwriting, which a lot of teachers criticized without offering any solution.

At the age of 14 I received an old metal dip-pen and I loved it but I didn't like the outcome, so... I started practicing, writing alphabets, letters, words, sentences, just for the pleasure of using the pen and finding the right shape for each letter. It is still a work in process though as I sometimes change the way I shape one or another letter and I still from time to time write down a couple alphabets.

I'm not claiming my handwriting is now fabulous, far from that, but I'm at least not ashamed of it and would gladly use it as a font (where appropriate).

[bluedino]

There's no excuse for illegible handwriting. It can be as simple as taking your time and making half-decent looking letters.

<- Tired of attempting to read other's scrawl

[tomjen3]

Mah, my time has value, so I will just type it.

[e3pi]

You are blessed to receive a rare human hand printed letter.

[mikeash]

Why isn't "I don't need to write enough for it to be worth the effort to improve it" an excuse?

[tomjen3]

I don't know, I have two old dip pens (as well as ink for them) and yet whenever I use them it seems I just smear ink everywhere and make huge blubs on the paper.

Anyway LaTeX has beautiful fonts, so I wouldn't worry too much about it yet.

[gchpaco]

Dip pens can be really touchy. I use a fountain pen a lot. Paper quality becomes extremely important; a ballpoint will skip over rough weaves in poorly made paper, but a pen with a nib will catch on them.

Why, then, would anybody use anything other than a ballpoint? For me the writing experience is smoother with a good nib pen on decent paper, and I hate cheap paper anyway. Even good ballpoints aren't great here; the only exception I've ever seen are these ceramic tipped ones: http://www.leevalley.com/US/gifts/page.aspx?p=70130&cat=4,53... As a result of poor-to-mediocre ability to write, my cursive degenerated terribly for years, becoming a terrible illiterate scrawl that even I couldn't read. After I started playing about with fountain pens, I discovered that it was actually a legitimate way of writing, and faster than printing everything everywhere.

[stevewillows]

I've been using disposable fountain pens from Bic for a while since I lost my nice one. A good place to start for people who want to casually try it out before dropping a few hundred dollars. :)