The problem with cursive

Why is it so difficult to create (or find) a good cursive computer font? Why do computer fonts so often look different from the handwriting we want to teach our students? 

It has to do with the dynamic, flexible nature of cursive. Letters adapt to their surrounding letters.

Below is the word sleeves. I have highlighted the only part of the letter e that stays the same each time in green:

That's not much, is it? In isolation, that wouldn't even be recognizable as a letter e, it looks more like an c. 

Why is the e so flexible? Let's first examine what happens just before the invariant part of the e. I have highlighted these sections in orange:

The most noticeable thing here is the connection from the v. Because the letter v ends at the midline - instead of at the baseline which is where most other letters end - it requires a different kind of connection. What is interesting (and challenging for font desigers) about this connection is how far ‘into’ the e this connections continues to be special. It's not so much a special connections to the letter e, but more like a special versions of the letter e.

But's there's more subtle stuff going on. Look at the connections towards the first two e's. Even though in both cases we come from the baseline, the two orange strokes are not parallel to each other. Why aren't they? Well, if the second orange stroke went up as steeply as the first one, the second e would end up positioned more to the left and would bump into the first e. But if we gave the first orange stroke the same shallow incline as the second one, the gap between the l and the e would become unnaturally large.

What about the strokes coming from the invariant part of the e? Are they dynamic too? I have highlighted them in blue so you can see for yourself:

Even though all three of these strokes start at the baseline, you can see that none of them are parallel to each other. The stroke towards the next e has the smallest incline, for reasons we already discussed. The stroke towards the v has the steepest incline. The stroke towards the s falls somewhere in between those two.

In conclusion, there's only a very small part of the letter e that is invariant. Most of what we would consider the beginning or the end of the letter turns out to be flexible: it is dependent on which letter comes before or after.

And this flexibility isn't limited to the e. Every letter has a flexible beginning and end. 

Getting these flexible parts right is the challenge that font developers have to face.

In my next article, I give an in-depth explanation for Why so many cursive fonts disappoint... and what distinguishes the good fonts.