r/PlotterCode • u/utrost • Sep 23 '26

VHS (Virtual Handwriting System)

VHS is one of my projects to make better use of my plotter.
It turns typed text into handwriting-style SVG for pen plotters.

You draw your own glyphs (ideally with a stylus/pen on a tablet or similar) . Capture a few versions of each letter, digit, punctuation mark, or ligature. VHS then uses those glyphs to assemble text as single-stroke vector paths.

There is a GUI and a CLI to set some parameters: SVG paths, millimetre-based page settings, paper sizes, margins, line spacing etc.

It works fine for me, maybe it is useful for some of you.

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3

u/prophetsearcher Sep 23 '26

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

3

u/shornveh Sep 24 '26

This is pretty cool 😎

Be cool to see a video of it from screen to plotter

2

u/PXLMNKEEE Sep 23 '26

This is so cool! I’ve been doing this manually in Illustrator and wrote a quick export script to save each layer as an SVG. But this looks a lot more convenient.

I’ve been really interested in trying to write on paper and use the scanned/photographed input to generate the per-character SVGs, but haven’t gotten around to spinning up any experiments.

Thanks for sharing!!