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Using handwritten text in InDesign

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 15, 2021
3 replies
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Hi-

I'm new to using InDesign. I'm trying to help someone who's creating a book dummy. For artistic reasons, she wants to use her own handwriting as captions for photos. We've experimented with a touchpad and Photoshop to write directly on images. We also want to write in blank spaces -- such as margins, empty pages, etc.

The questions are, can we do this directly in InDesign? If so, how?

I want to emphasize we don't want to use the type tool. We want to write directly onto the page with a touchpad. I know that writing onto paper and scanning is possible, but we'd also like to avoid that.

Thanks for the help.

How to

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Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Check out Fontself, a plugin for Photoshop and/or Illustrator.

https://www.fontself.com/

$39 US for just one program plugin or $59 US for both programs.

I've used it and it is fairly easy to create a font.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

josephr6183654Author

New Participant

Thanks, I'll take a look. But I don't really want to create a font. I want to use the actual handwriting. Seems it's either the pencil tool or write on paper and scan.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

If you write and scan each letter, you can easily make a font. Unless you have a Wacom-type tablet on your computer or an iPad-type tablet, you won't get natural handwriting.

To me, the choices are:

Create a natural-looking font with one's own handwriting.
Write and scan the different lines/paragraphs of text and treat as art.
Get a tablet for your computer or use a standalone tablet [added] or a touch-screen computer.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Jumpenjax

Community Expert

Having a typeface made seems pretty exorbitant in price, I just look and wow. My recommendation would be hand write each one on a nice white paper. Scan it into photoshop. Clean up what you do not want, drop the background. Then save as a .psd. Place into InDesign as a picture. You can size it in InDesign to fit the hand written captions as needed.

Lee- Graphic Designer, Print Specialist, Photographer

josephr6183654Author

New Participant

Thanks. This is the backup plan, but I was hoping to avoid the extra steps of scanning, adjusting in Photoshop, and importing into InDesign.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Brainiac

I think this is the only reasonable solution, despite the steps involved. It also gives you a great deal of control over the result.

Whatever the result in the final publication, the idea smacks of "But I do this all the time on my iPad!" and may not be easily applicable to a publishing platform, InDesign or any other. There are a lot of such things, trivial/easy on touch or other platforms but not replicable on a desktop/app. 🙂

BobLevine

Community Expert

Have you tried the pencil tool?

josephr6183654Author

New Participant

Thanks. Yes, we've tried the pencil tool but it seems rather awkward with the anchor points appearing. Is there a way to do this without dealing with those?

jmlevy

Community Expert

Did you try to use a drawing tablet?

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