Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


      A Solution for Group "Best Wishes" Certificates During the Pandemic

   Adam Engst

   The High Noon Athletic Club that I run with has a tradition, or at
   least it did before the pandemic. To commemorate when one of our
   regulars moves away, we mark the event with a 'last run,' complete with
   libations at a nearby creek and a membership certificate that was
   secretly passed around in the locker room for the rest of the group to
   affix their best wishes. One of our members recently completed her PhD
   and was headed off for a postdoc at MIT, but since noontime runs aren't
   yet happening regularly, there was no way to collect signatures.

   Rather than let another tradition fall prey to the pandemic, I came up
   with a solution that I'd like to share in case anyone else finds
   themselves in a similar situation. My approach had to meet a few
   requirements:
     * People had to be able to write whatever message they wanted.
     * The messages on the membership certificate had to look handwritten,
       but not as though they were all written by the same person with the
       same pen.
     * It couldn't require any time-consuming graphics work in cleaning up
       scanned or photographed messages.

   To collect the messages, I set up a [1]Google Form with a single short
   answer question and sent the link to the club mailing list. I
   encouraged people to keep their messages brief, though I wasn't
   surprised when a few got wordy. Many people don't realize that Google
   Forms can save responses to a Google Sheet, making it easy to work with
   the data after the fact. That got me the data I needed, in a form that
   made it easy to copy and paste.

   The linchpin for the project was Font Meme's [2]Text Graphic Generator
   for Handwriting Fonts. It let me enter some text, choose from a wide
   variety of handwriting fonts, and pick a color, after which it turned
   my text into a PNG graphic. Once I was satisfied, it was easy to
   Control-click the graphic and choose Copy Image.

   Next, I opened our membership certificate in [3]Affinity Publisher.
   (I'm converting all my projects from Adobe InDesign and Adobe
   Illustrator to Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer because they
   each cost about the same as a single month of Adobe's Creative Cloud).
   I pasted the message in, resized it to fit in an empty area, and angled
   it so it looked more like someone was trying to fit it into a
   particular spot. Then I repeated the process with all the other
   messages, choosing a different font for each. I had to insert returns
   into a few of them to make them more vertical than horizontal, and for
   some, I changed the color from black to blue to simulate people writing
   with different pens. It took a little work to resize and arrange them
   all in a realistic fashion, but the end result came out great and was
   significantly cleaner (and less sweat-stained) than our usual efforts.

   This little project is far from being a cure for cancer, but it was a
   good feeling to be able to leverage various tools to do something nice
   for a departing friend. I hope others find it helpful as well.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.google.com/forms/about/
   2. https://fontmeme.com/handwriting-fonts/
   3. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

   Hidden links:
   4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/08/Google-Forms-certificate.png
   5. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/08/Text-Generator-certificate.png
   6. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2021/08/Affinity-Publisher-certificate.jpg

.