I've somehow created Cthulu's own cursed Wingdings with this vibe-coded tool that promises to create fonts from your own handwriting
Today, I tried to create a font based on my own handwriting using a free, browser-based tool. Unfortunately, I think I may have summoned something deeply cursed into being.
FontCrafter is the vibe-coded creation of Chris Pirillo. It's incredibly easy to use—just print out the supplied template, fill it out using a felt-tip pen specifically ("ballpoints are too faint; thick markers bleed"), scan your completed template back in, and upload it. As most of the heavy-lifting happens within your browser, sans interaction from a server elsewhere, no account is necessary and the creator touts the tool as "100% private".
With your scans in hand, the tool should then scrape your handwritten characters and fashion a font that's all your own—'should' being the operative word.
My first attempt was foiled by the only felt tip pen I could find in all of PCG towers rapidly running out of ink. The printer cutting the template's alignment crosshairs in half didn't help either. After a bit of resizing and committing to rendering my handwritten characters as opaquely as I could manage, I tried again—and rendered something unspeakably cursed.
Should you want to give this tool a go yourself, you'll need to supply three rows of characters. This not only introduces a bit of appealing variation to your own handwritten font, but also gives the tool a few more samples to draw from just in case. Unfortunately, that didn't help my attempts much, and I'm pretty sure I've made a font fit for only arcane rituals and old god calling cards. Now that's kerning only cephalopodic gods could appreciate.
Setting aside the fact any attempt from me to write in cursive ends up looking pretty cursed anyway, there are a few other reasons this tool may not have liked my handwriting samples. Though I tried to boost the opacity of my felt tip characters by uploading a black and white scan with the contrast boosted, a pen that's not been left to languish in a temperate office still would've been ideal in the first place.
This is hardly the first time either man or machine has had trouble reading my handwriting either, but the issue could also lie within the tool itself. As FontCrafter is vibe coded with AI assistance, any issue is going to be that much harder to isolate and fix—this is why comments from human coders are still incredibly important to any code base. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to tell a cosmic horror why I was late to dinner.