Since then, I re-taught myself to write with an Italic hand, which has more "backtracks" (for instance, 'e' is two strokes) and fewer joins (you never join from e, o, r, or any letter with a descender), and while my speed has suffered somewhat, everyone who sees my handwriting compliments it.

If your hand cramps while writing, it is because you are holding the pen too tightly, possibly in order to apply too much pressure. This is something that writing with ball-point pens will cause you to do. If you don't want to use a fountain pen, at least try a liquid ink rollerball.

In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.

I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.

Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".

Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.

The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.

(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)

[1]: http://melinsstenografi.nu/image/sti-ukast.png

I stopped using it right after graduating high school (where it was required), never used in drafts after elementary school, and only ever used normal print letters in the university (and also included TeX commands because I was typesetting lecture notes later and was figuring out the optimal command set on the fly).

Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.

That being said I don't think it is about Cyrillic vs Latin but more about traditional cursive vs modern.

The traditional Latin cursives were all pretty much optimized to be written in one running flow. Kurrent and cursive all come from Latin currere which means running.

Admittedly none of them go as far as connecting the i and j dots but otherwise they are pretty much completely connected. But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards. With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke. Lifting the pen yes, backtracking no.

With the connected dots OP's Backtrack-Free Cursive still wins here and I really like that because someone found an optimization to something that already has been optimized for centuries.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift

I had some friends who worked on this for a while but didn't get far with it. It turns out it's tricky to design a general purpose system that adapts to users' handwriting idiosyncrasies and is fast enough to work in real time with handwriting with sufficient accuracy.

Some of that work is still visible in the ChromeOS virtual keyboard handwriting mode, but it's very limited - one line at a time. https://cursive.apps.chrome/ (the built-in note-taking app on Chromebooks) has some interesting inking gestures for manipulating written words, but doesn't have any semantic-level understanding.

I don't cross ts either, I tested out on a piece of paper and what I do is a vertical (slightly curved) stroke, loop to the left, cross the stroke and then a downwards stroke.

I tried the jitter example and instinctively I dotted the j but not the i for some reason. Would love to see some research on this.

I really miss cursive honestly, at least for me I feel a much closer connection to the writing than when typing.

One problem I had was that dotless i tended to blend in with neighboring characters, e.g. "in" looked like "m", "ij" looked like "y". I solved that by elongating "i" downwards. This made it unintelligible for other people, so I only use it in my own personal notes.

Other languages are similar: for German if you look at either Kurrent or Sütterlin really only i gets special treatment. The umlauts are given as two dots in examples, but when i read letters and other informal documents they usually end up being a bar.

I like the connected dot for i and j! Clever, and i will try to adopt it. Most of my handwritten writing these days is for myself.

Wouldn't the ф as well?

> [for the x], I draw two mirrored c’s

Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception?

For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.

The "mirrored c's" is a perfectly normal way to write x longhand in English. At least that's how I was taught in England 65 years ago.

I think the old German writing system “current” also has very few pen lifts, but reading that stuff gives me a headache.

Still use cursive after 60 years, though nowadays, less on paper, and more using Gboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gboard). (It reads my handwriting better than I can, but I still keep looking for something better.)

Somehow, this caption appears to the right of two logos which clearly require two strokes for their ts. What happened?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WLzDcJBfLOk

Rewrite proper prototype router report!

Anybody got a better one?

Can see how penmanship there would be appreciated.

Maybe it’s the qwerty keyboard or my bad typing habits but certain characters break my flow when typing.

Plus some uppercase e.g. A, B, H, right?

Some person recognized a problem they wanted solved and put a bunch of effort into creating a unique solution.

I love this stuff.

This post is perfect for HN.

The Cyrillic script was invented in Bulgaria (during the First Bulgarian Empire), and was used to write Bulgarian language, creating a huge literary corpus, long before it began spreading to Kievan Rus. The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.

And no, Bulgaria was never part of Russia nor the Soviet Union.