Text-to-Handwriting is now a read-only project

[saurabhdaware]

Hey everyone! I want to Thank you for all the support on this project.

Text to Handwriting started as a joke and never thought it will receive the popularity it is receiving today. As much as I love the popularity it is getting, This also increases the issues and PRs on the repository, emails of people asking for features, bug reports, etc. This eventually needs my attention. Even if I decide to stop actually committing and just focus on reviewing the PRs and replying to issues, that still is a lot for me.

Building tools to improve the development experience is something that I truly enjoy and thus most of my other projects are focused on DX. Text-to-handwriting is not that and to be honest, I don't enjoy working on this as much as I do with Abell or other projects. As already mentioned, text-to-handwriting was just supposed to be a joke, I never really considered maintaining this for so long.

Nowadays, I am mostly focused on Abell, my job, and taking the necessary breaks to chill and spend time with people offline. For the last few months working on this project is a compromise on my offline time.

I know there are so many cool features that you all requested but it just won't be possible to have them all because

1. Time limitation as I mentioned
2. Trying to push the limits to make it 100% same as a handwritten image won't really be possible as we hit the implementation limitations in some cases. For example, we can't have randomized words since the text is actually a font, We can't get it all right in the page effects since the effects are CSS and doing anything in that part is difficult and time-consuming, you can't use it for maths assignments because of all the limitations on the computer text that does not allow you to have the math-related symbols.

Thus I feel whatever could be done with this project, is already done. The things that remain are either extremely complicated to implement or simply not possible.

Thus, I've taken the decision to archive this project.

What does this mean?

• There won't be any updates to the tool. No features or bug fixes.
• The tool will always be hosted on https://saurabhdaware.github.io/text-to-handwriting/ and it is not going anywhere.
• You can't create issues, PRs etc.
• if you still want any particular feature, you can take a fork and maintain the feature in the fork

Text-to-handwriting became a reason for a lot of my wins. From being the first google search result for "Text to Handwriting", becoming a trending repository on GitHub, getting a shoutout in so many amazing articles, lots of kind emails and messages on my social media, and a shoutout from the Dan Abramov.

And beyond the numbers, some of my favorite wins were-

• when someone reached out to me on Twitter with a screenshot of their college WhatsApp group where they were freaking out about the tool!
• There was a teacher who showed this tool to her students!
• A parent, helping their kid with the assignment that needed urgent submission
• Anddd a whole lot of messages about how their teachers couldn't figure out the difference and gave them full marks xD

Definitely looking forward to more of these! Thank you, everyone!

Here's to normalizing making decisions for mental health 🌻

~ Saurabh

[saurabhdaware]

Have opened it only for the covid donations change. The tool itself is still read-only (though not archived) and I won't be able to merge any changes