letterpaths

Hey HN, a while back, I saw Robin Linacre's post on HN showing his work on letter paths, a way for people to write in cursive: https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths I thought it was quite fun and relaxing, even meditative. Later on, I was watching a video on online betting, particularly Polymarket. And I got an idea to create a simple app where we can use cursive writing as a form of meditation to overcome the urge of betting. That's when Urge Surfer was born. The idea is that, for an urge that requires a screen and is something that you don't really want to do, you can use Urge Surfer to "surf" that wave. It seems that urges can sometimes be like waves: they get stronger, but in a short time period, they pass. The sentences are self-compassionate, kind, gentle, and hopefully that helps people put themselves at ease while the urge passes.

The letters are based on how they're formed in the UK primary school curriculum. Each letter is a json that defines the bezier curves according to a schema. They were created by starting by drawing the letters freehand, yielding essentially a dot to dot, and then (2) using an approximation/smoothing algorithm to convert that into beziers. Finally,I went through touching up/fixing each letter by hand, using a purpose built editor. So I would say overall it's more time consuming than challenging. That stills leaves the problem of joining letters together. For that I heavily lent on AI to propose an algorithm, although it required a lot of back and forth to get something even semi decent. At the moment it's probably 'good enough' but there's still lots of room for improvement. On the countries quiz, you should be able to move and zoom on

letterpaths (https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths), a FOSS typescript library that can power cursive handwriting/educational apps for kids. The idea is that it provides all the geometry to enables games like these to be built: (These are just rough demos) https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/writing_app/snake/ https://www.robinlinacre.com/letter_constellations/ And here is like the admin/demo: https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/ And, separately, I made an educational country quiz, again FOSS: https://rupertlinacre.com/country_quiz https://github.com/RupertLinacre/country_quiz