Here are just ideas that I’m jotting down after Week 3 of Synthetic Media class.

This idea was sparked by Gene Kogan’s work, A Book From the Sky and the following example using Runway ML shown in class:

I’ve been working to train a GAN machine learning model to draw letterforms based on a set of input typefaces with @runwayml. Here is an interpolation of it drawing an S. #machinelearning #gan #ai #generative #runwayml pic.twitter.com/sLPLp45Xrf
— Leon Butler (@leonbutler) November 27, 2019

The ‘magical wish’ I’ve always had is — what if a preview of a typeface could be generated from a test sketch (e.g. handgloveshuman, adhesion)?

The sketch I showed Yining to consult on the method.

Datasets are where things get tricky — I know that perhaps I could probably use the googlefonts library and use drawbot or something to automate getting font pixel data. (not sure if vector data would work, but bitmap data seems it might be more easy? I could be mistaken)

If the googlefonts library doesn’t work, I think I could also use the preview renderer from MyFonts via scraping.

Fortunately, you can manipulate the online renderer via changing the text. This link was working as of February 2020:

https://render.myfonts.net/fonts/font_rend.php?id=698b4dc0fdc0696a2cc7851e4d7065c8&rt=A&rs=32&w=1500&sc=2&nie=true&fg=000000&bg=FFFFFF&ft=ccmp%2Cmark%2Cmkmk%2Cliga%2Cclig%2Ckern%2Cpalt&nf=1

With manipulating these values, you can change the sample text, and background/text color.

A problem is though, that the fonts have unique IDs and there’s seemingly no easy way to get them:

Inspecting a myfonts page via Chrome Inspector

So, it seems that if I search the ‘id’ using a font_rend prefix I can grab quite a few ids. Of course, doing this one by one seems too annoying…

Perhaps this is where making a scraping script like Sam Lavigne’s Flickr Scraper will come in handy. Not sure how this will work for myfonts yet; gotta dig through old files….

What Machine Learning Pipeline to use?

This is the big question. Talking to Yining, she mentioned that there would be two ways to go about it — one being StyleGAN and the other being a Style Transfer.

The Style GAN would allow me to explore a vector space, but be limited in terms of giving visual input (rather, I would have to try to build some way of navigating the vector). In short, it’s limited in terms of generating new content.

If i wanted to give a visual input and have the machine generate other characters that look like the input, an easier way to go about it would be a Style Transfer. It seems that this might be the way to go for what I want to create.