In high school, I bought boxes of Pilot V5s at Staples, and told anyone who seemed to care that they were the best writing pens to be found. Now the geniuses at Pilot have turned to the web and made a site/tool that’s pretty interesting. You just write letters on a printed template, hold it up to your webcam and it makes a ‘font’ of it that you can write e-correspondence with.

I tried it and well, it’s both pretty rad and really weird. I mean I made a half decent handwriting “font” in a matter of minutes. Using a webcam! On the other hand, the automated tool picked up some false positive images which screwed up several letters, there was no preview before saving and no editing after saving. Plus the editing tools are really pretty bad — the “A” looks funny because it didn’t read that so I moused it in using their odd editing tool. Plus of course at the end you don’t have a font, you have uh, your own handwriting which you can only use to write notes…

Then again, why should I expect perfection out of something that was free and took ten minutes? And when was the last time I made a font, even of my handwriting? As if I haven’t been interested since forever: thanks Pilot for giving me a chance to try it.