I work in a very bureocratic work and for some years I needed to sign a lot of papers each day. Actually all these was prepared by an assistant but need to had my signature because of the position I had.
To solve this I had made a stamp with my name and signature. I had visited a shop that sells stamps, put my signature on a paper and after some days they presented me a wooden stamp with a perfect copy of my signature on it. So when the papers needed signing I gave it to my assistant and she just stamped my sign to all the needed papers!
Of course that means that she could also sign other things as myself but I trusted her and was careful to sometimes glimpse at the papers that were signed (they all had the same template).
I have to confess though that it was really crazy how easy it was to copy my signature and have a way to sign every kind of paper. I presume that if some signature of me was in a non proper place I could complain and a specialist would recognise it...
Signatures are not really anti-forgery proof as most people expect...
Instead they are protected by law. If you sign something claiming to be someone else, you have broken the law.
That's why credit cards required a signature for a long time, yet nobody ever checked the signatures on the receipt vs the card. It isn't hard to fake someone else's signature, but doing so is a crime. Using someone else's card without a signature would just be a breach of the T&C's, but not a crime.
Okay, but in that case you're not breaking the law if you sign in their name -- at least in some countries. So it'd be probably back to "just a ToS violation".
But if someone had signed the card and you signed your own name on the receipt then you didn't commit fraud right? It is this system assuming that the receipt signature was checked against the card?
You’d think the law could just say that you can’t pretend (via any mechanism, a signature or otherwise) to be someone else in order to receive some material gain.
In the UK at least that is indeed a crime and I assume it's in one of the model criminal codes in the US. "Theft by deception" - basically you need to show intent to deceive and thereby permanently deprive someone of something of value.
So "Lied about going to the same high school, she gave me her number" doesn't cut it, but "Showed my brother's ID to the dealer, drove away with a car" is definitely a crime.
You can do that passively by just not correcting people who assume you're authorized. If you require a clear cut act of deception in order to complete a fraud, such as signing someone else's name, it becomes very easy to prosecute.
I thought this was a genius idea. I wanted to have one for myself.
So I've been trying to do a "journal printer" a few years now, using the Chinese mass produced version of the diy pen plotter.
The goal is simple, to "print" text to an arbitrary piece of paper inside a journal, with an arbitrary font and size. Perhaps a future stretch goal would be to ad basic line art printing skills.
Why? So I can copy to permanent pages dozens of 2fa codes, car vins, whatever I want to capture in digital form and have it persisted in analog form in a known volume of works that is much less likely to be lost vs a single piece of paper.
Couple that with dictation and a handwriting font and I can write an entire letter using on the right voice, and yet have the results come out looking like the entire letter was handwritten, or at least a neater handwriting than I can actually produce. One copy goes in the journal, one copy goes on a single sheet of paper to be mailed.
So far I have found that it is incredibly difficult to make a pen plotter draw arbitrary text files or anything more than a single image with the basic software that came with the pain Potter I have.
I'm not certain if buying a nicer pen plotter would make this process easier or not, but frankly I haven't seen anyone else trying to do when I'm trying to do, they seem to want to make random line fractals or arbitrary images, which is fine but just not my use case.
I am surprised you are having so much trouble with the software. What you might want to look into is how 3D printers and hobby CNC machines are controlled. GRBL for example is a standard CNC firmware that can run on an Arduino Uno and can control a 2.5 axis machine like a plotter easily. Combine that with some cheap stepper motors, GT2 timing belts and pulleys, a couple of endstop switches, and mounted on a 2020 aluminum frame and you got yourself a plotter that can do pretty much anything. Depending on the plotter you already have it could be as simple as reflashing the firmware on its controller.
Another option is Marlin which runs on slightly beefier ATMega Arduinos. This is what’s used in most 3D printers. And of course you could just buy a 3D printer and mount a pen on it.
The beauty of this approach is that you use a slicer to plan all the moves of the plotter on a much more powerful computer and the plotter just gets the GCode instructions of where to move each axis.
The software you want is something that can generate an SVG out of your handwriting font, then convert that GCode. Inkscape can do that and I suspect it might be able to be driven from the command line. You’d need to script up a way to feed it speech to text, and for it to fit stuff onto pages, but that just sounds like a good weekend. Check this out for inspiration: https://medium.com/@urish/how-to-turn-your-3d-printer-into-a...
I think OP is saying "without writing my own code and scripts to tie a bunch of tools together, I can't seem to do what I want".
Which is true. There is no software I can see today which you can open a text file, select a font, choose a page size, and click "Print" and have a plotter do the drawing, just like Microsoft Word can do with a regular printer.
In a way this is because 3D printers and plotters decided to have their own custom tooling and protocols (GCode isn't really a standard, since it is so machine specific), unlike printers where a PDF file will print on any printer pretty much.
I don’t think you will find a Microsoft solution to this. But that Python script can take in SVG. On the other hand you have easy speech to text software. I am not super familiar with text layout tools, but I am almost certain there are multiple approaches you can take to generate a paginated SVG from text with a given font and text file. HTML to PDF via wkhtmltopdf can certainly do that, and I suspect GraphicMagick can take a PDF and spit out a path only SVG.
This isn’t the fault of 3D printers and their firmware. This is lack of understanding which parts of the tool chain do what. You wouldn’t expect a regular laser printer to recognize your speech, right? Most of them don’t do fonts either. And every single printer uses a different set of firmware and a different driver. By comparison, 3D printers use only about 5 common variants of GCode, of which GRBL and Marlin compatible ones are the most common by far. You can use multiple different slicers to produce tool paths for any given printer and printers from multiple manufacturers use compatible or identical firmware, guaranteeing that you don’t need to update drivers because that concept doesn’t exist. 3D printers came later and were able to avoid the many mistakes that 2d printers made. Everything is open source, everything is compatible and kept up to date, and even the hardware is abstracted away: you can swap in a 32 bit board for an 8 bit board, wire it up, change your architecture target, compile, and your printer will run as before. Have you ever tried putting a new board from an HP into a Canon printer? I doubt you’d ever be able to do that.
Best of luck and I hope you find a solution. As I mentioned in my other comment, the only part of this I don’t know for sure is how to convert a written page to a path only SVG. I suspect GraphicMagick can do it. If so, your toolchain will be speech to text (pick your favorite one or use e.g. an Amazon Echo and a custom skill), text to HTML (with a stylesheet that sets the correct page size and your custom handwriting font), HTML to PDF using wkhtmltopdf, PDF to path only SVG using GM, SVG to GCode using the script from my link above or another similar tool, and OctoPrint or similar to drive the plotter remotely. You could likely bang this out in a day with a bash script.
I am actually curious, how much would you pay for a complete solution like this? Also this is definitely inspiring me to add a pen attachment to my 3D printer and try some plotter stuff.
Im probably a cheapskate. Hence me buying the Chinese knock off vs the actual axidraw or similar.
But if I can feed a page size in inches with 0.5 inch margins on all sides and have a given PDF or text doc printed, I'd pay 300-450 for a given product if it existed, if only to have this project off my plate.
I know if it ever did exist it would be 2k like one of those fancy fully automatic book scanners but I suppose I could dream
Stuff written to a bound journal is more permanent and much more difficult to edit or alter without someone noticing.
3 ring binders are bulkier and can be raided for pages or have inserted pages. The goal of writing this is for 30 years later or so that the pages are still bound and readable.
My grandmother gave me a 3 ring binder based cookbook recently. It had the first 4 pages falling out of it and all it had done since the 70s was sit on the shelf (was her backup cookbook). If that can happen to the cookbook with professional paper, my cheap no name paper certainly would do worse.
From another angle if I could cheaply hardbound some printer paper with glue or some sort of press then that would also work for the first case present in my original post, if not the second one.
Transfer printing is basically printing on an object then transferring that print to another. Historically it's how patterns get applied to pottery and the like, though in today's world the term is used to describe is how iron-on inkjet print paper works so people at home can "print" on t-shirts.
Another option might be the hand-held ink jet printers. Though, the one's I've seen used are about printing the same thing a whole bunch (barcodes and other labels on boxes coming off a production line). They'd probably not have a great UI for single use messages. I've never looked, but given that they're a niche product, they're probably also very expensive.
I've been interested in buying an ID card printer for the same purpose--it would be interesting to just record arbitrary information (again, like 2FA codes) onto blank ID cards. But even the used ones are expensive (and don't have Linux support).
When I was in the 4th or 5th grade my Dad, who ran a small business, had a rubber stamp of his signature that my Mom used while acting as secretary.
I loved that thing since I used it for a while to sign any papers that the teacher sent home when I didn't do my homework. It was all good until back to school night one year when my teacher handed a stack of those signed papers to my Mom.
I think I got grounded for a whole summer that year.
Tangentially related: does anyone here happen to know if celebrities use 2 different signatures (one for fans, one for signing official documents)? Or do they give away their actual signature every time?
If the latter, I'm really wondering how that is not widely abused. Sure, it's illegal (as remarked above). But for celebrities that give out massive amounts of fan signatures, you'd think one of them would eventually be abused.
I'm not really a celebrity, but I have given a couple of autographs (when I published a typography magazine). I made a conscious decision to not use my regular signature and instead use a calligraphic logotype instead. I have a version of that as the favicon of my writing website.
There's a link to the article on a related device, the LongPen:
> The LongPen is a remote signing device conceived of by writer Margaret Atwood in 2004 and debuted in 2006. It allows a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet and a robotic hand.
> The system was used by Conrad Black, who was under arrest, to "attend" a book signing event without leaving his home.
Atwood is Canadian. Black is Canadian. Canada also makes the robot arms used on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. What is it with Canadians and robot arms?!
Jefferson's pantograph goes back well before his time. Also, by use of a pantograph (2 axes of translation) between two linked turntables (rotation), one could enlarge maquettes for finishing sculpture that had been roughly pointed.
It works the other way too. American Type Founders used a pantograph to cut matrices from large engraved patterns. Frederick Goudy realized that engraved metal patterns weren't strictly necessary and cut his own patterns from thick paper for cutting matrices.
Do modern systems encode a degree of variability? Either by way of slightly varying the parameters of the underlying vectors (beziers?) to mimic the slight variability in speed and curvature of a true signature, or by analysing 100 input samples to generate a wider variability of outputs?
Seems like this would add to the ambiguity over provenance.
You could probably use some form of DMP [0] for this. It basically learns movements by viewing them as the difference from a spring-damper system. This allows all kinds of adaptations.
We had one of these things in the back room of an alumni development office that I worked in >15 years ago, which was used to sign appeals and thank-you letters to big donors. It could only duplicate the university president's signature, whose office was about a 15-minute walk away and was usually too busy to sign stuff like this.
I was surprised when I first saw it, because I assumed printing technology could do a pretty good job of approximating a signature. I was told nothing could copy pen on high-grade paper.
Like many things in Real Genius, it had some basis in fact: as I heard the story, the sweepstakes stuffing was done via line printer, when they were leading- instead of trailing-edge technology.
To solve this I had made a stamp with my name and signature. I had visited a shop that sells stamps, put my signature on a paper and after some days they presented me a wooden stamp with a perfect copy of my signature on it. So when the papers needed signing I gave it to my assistant and she just stamped my sign to all the needed papers!
Of course that means that she could also sign other things as myself but I trusted her and was careful to sometimes glimpse at the papers that were signed (they all had the same template).
I have to confess though that it was really crazy how easy it was to copy my signature and have a way to sign every kind of paper. I presume that if some signature of me was in a non proper place I could complain and a specialist would recognise it...