Re: Automated Rant Generators and Letter Generators

David Conrad told me he meant for this to go to the whole list, but only
sent it to me by mistake. So here is his post.


At 4:14 PM 7/18/95, David R. Conrad wrote:
>Tim May <tcmay@sensemedia.net> writes:
>>Bart's comments about using Knuth's typographic work are interesting, to
>>the extent that letters need to look handwritten. In the Mac market, it's
>>possible to send in some handwriting samples and get back a font that
>>emulates the handwriting!
>
>I suppose the resulting font has only one form for each letter?  (Although
>I understand that when you send them a sample, you send several instances
>of each letter; a friend was showing me an add for this.)  The fact that
>each letter is the same every time would be a giveaway.  We need something
>like Metafont, or at least choose from a number of different shapes.
>
>>                                                 ... So, the combination of
>>handwriting fonts, automated rant generators (of varying rabidities), and
>>fax capabilities gives a pretty good start. Using lots of handwriting
>>samples, various other fonts, and a mix of styles in the letters will help.
>
>Another factor that would make it appear more authentic would be spelling
>and grammar errors.  The grammar errors could be built into the rant
>generators (an occasional dangling modifier, an incomplete sentence or two);
>spelling errors could be done by post-processing the output of the rantgens.
>It's important to take into account the different types of spellos that
>occur: commonly misspelled words (aquired, beleive); wrong homophone (their,
>they're, there; two, to, too); transposed letters (transpoesd); near-misses
>on qwerty keyboards (nesr-mosses); and words left out.
>
>--
>David R. Conrad, ab411@detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/
>Finger conrad@grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page
>Key fingerprint =  33 12 BC 77 48 81 99 A5  D8 9C 43 16 3C 37 0B 50
>No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.

My motivation in suggesting the use of a pen-plotter to generate
    output was to make the letter appear to come from a flesh and
    blood human who doesn't do computers or even FAX.  Somewhere,
    perhaps from Jim Warren or the EFF, I had heard that the pols
    payed attention to handwritten letters far more than FAXs or
    email or phone calls.  The rant generator-to-postal mail gateway
    might give netters more leverage than we have now.