I live in Austin TX and got one of the mailers last year. I was wondering how you pulled it off.
The handwriting on the outside does make it look personal but, once you open it, it is obviously computer generated due to the consistency of the writing. If anything, I'd say the writing in inside undermined the message because nobody is going to handwrite a letter to solicit that business. You should test only doing the signature only and see if impacts your response rate.
We also got a couple of 'we want to buy your home' mailings. It does feel like it impacts our open rate but I can't tell if it is just due to novelty.
I think the main reason it 'works' as a business proposition is that the City is doing blanket increases and relying on protests to catch their mistakes. They do this (in part) because they are forbidden from using actual MLS data. It costs me 3-4 hours to do a protest so outsourcing it makes sense if your time is valuable. But when it came down to it, I wasn't willing to let them represent me -- something about it felt off -- and I wound up just accepting the increase.
The system doesn't feel broken -- just wasteful. How else are you going to do a property tax? I do wonder if this goes the way of medical billing (overcharge at first because you know you are going to lose some to protests) or it creates a watchdog effect that make the City limit the increases to an amount that is not likely to draw protests.
No way, you got one of our letters? That's crazy! I'd be curious which version you got. We sent a few different iterations. I'll have to look you up tomorrow when I'm back at the computer.
Re: the system. I can't disagree there. It's a disaster and there has to be a better way. Counties rely on a certain percentage of people protesting and the ones that don't get kinda screwed imo. The unfortunate truth is that everyone should protest every year. That's a broken system. Some other states only revalue every third year, so the counties have a better shot at fairly valuing everything because they have 1/3rd the workload. Not Texas though. They revalue everything every year, so it all just gets ballparked.
Really impressive and fun to build I'm sure. I bought an Axidraw last year to play around with making fake signatures of fake people and as well we were getting a ton of Etsy orders and we always write a hand written note, but we couldn't keep up at Christmas time and my wife's wrist was breaking, so it saved our bacon when we had to write like 600 notes in 6 weeks.
The fact that you have to keep replacing the sheet and realigning is definitely a drag, but we made a system that worked well enough for us. Making the SVG letters is a pain and we are working on designing our own font from my wife's handwriting, but you can at least SVGize a picture of your writing and then touch it up in an editor.
Gives a good excuse to buy lots of different fun pens and paper, but yeah it's annoying when a pen stops writing half a letter and I'm not sure if it's just an ink thing or a pressure thing.
We've gotten positive reviews that mention our handwritten notes at least and lots of comments on great service and such, so we think it makes a difference.
I think people will be able to tell the difference between the handwritten SVG and the font on anything more than a short paragraph. Our brains are great at finding patterns, and the regular shapes of fonts are such a pattern.
So depending on your use case your time might be better spend on improving the handwriting->vector pipeline instead of designing a font (not that that isn't fun too)
The Autopen AF is a commercial product for this.[1]
There's also MAXWriter and RealPen. All have paper feeders, so they can turn out page after page, unattended.
In China, some kids use automatic writing machines to do their homework.
See also the LongPen, conceived by author Margaret Atwood for remote book signings. I particularly like the name because it sounds like something out of her fiction.
I was about to get out my pitchfork but then I discovered that this is not used for marketing false authenticity. It is actually used in a service that attempts to help people lower their property tax rates. Due to the peculiar aspects of how this works in Texas, a "handwritten" note can improve the chances of a reduction.
I'm still surprised how often I get still direct mail with something "handwritten" on it, where it's obviously not, because every same letter looks the same.
This seems like a problem solvable with just software, i.e. introducing artificial variations in the fonts. Why the seemingly overly complicated jump to using real pens in a plotter?
It's the font improvements that could possibly fool me, not the indentation of a real pen.
Adobe’s CFF font format (found tucked away inside OTF font files) has a ‘random’ operator, though most font handlers I’ve seen don’t bother to implement it.
I think a naive randomness would look bad. As in "I have 3 variations of each letter and choose one on random". Because how I write a letter is influenced by letters before (so have to create ligatures I guess). But for the same reason, randomly making some variation to the letters would feel "off" if it doesn't take into account the letters before and after. There is a flow to writing.
Of course, doing anything is better than having the two e's in "meet" be identical, which spoils it being real handwriting from the get-go.
It's hard to introduce random into actual fonts. I don't even know how I'd do that. What I could've done is just generate the SVG and then print it, that would've been a lot easier but way less fun.
The reason you get crappy printed mail that's obviously a fake is because it's cheap and easy. Not everyone wants to build robots.
I have no idea if this is possible, but I remember an article in Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" about Knuth's "Metafont". It sounded like one could define certain variables to alter the equations of the font. This could be one way of easily introducing randomness.
While this is honestly very cool from an engineering perspective, it feels highly unnecessary and even disingenuous. the whole point of sending a handwritten letter "in this day and age" is to signal that real effort was put forth for this communication which indirectly shows its importance to the sender.
The difficulty and tediousness of the action is precisely what gives it it's perceived value in the eyes of the receiver.
And while it's arguable that building such an elaborate contraption to mimic handwriting is in itself a signal of the importance of the communication, it still gives off a sense of disingenuousness to me.
It’s just like deepfaked video and audio; it undermines the value and trustworthiness of the real thing by flooding the “market” with hard-to-spot fakes. In this case, the “market” is people’s trust in the proof-of-work of a seemingly handwritten letter.
Oddly enough I've received fake handwritten letters for a long time, they're always junk mail, so like a lot of advertising ideas, the novelty wears off quickly.
I've received a lot of handwritten-but-printed-letters (ie. it looks like handwriting at first glance, but if you look closely it looks printed because there's zero artifacts typically associated with handwriting), but I've never received junk mail that's actually hand-written (ie. this post, presumably I won't be able to tell).
I understand that handwritten letters might receive a bit more attention, but doesn't it come across as unprofessional? It would for me - I would assume they don't have the money to properly print at least the address fields.
Obvious growth hack thing - try to bypass the brains "this is spammy mail ad crap" by making you first think it's written by a person and not a printer, thus it should be important.
In the initial model the pen is slanted but parallel to the axis of the sheet, and in the last model it's vertical. Does this change the style of the writing? I think I hold the pen like rotated at 45°. What about that? Have you tried with a ink pen?
What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
Holding it at 45 works well for e.g. a sharpie, but it didn't work quite as well for a ball point pen, which we ended up using.
We tried a bunch of different pens and eventually ended up on G2 for reliability and "rollability," if thats a thing. Way fewer dead spots than some of the other pens. Also, we could see remaining ink and swap out early.
> What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
It's bigger!
Seriously though, this was an off the shelf pen plotter (Axidraw) until I blew up one of the axes. So it's the same controller, same motors, same pen carriage, and one of the same arms. We simply took one axes and made it super long.
So it does introduce random variation. I had the employee write each letter ~15 times, and then they are plucked at random and then more "wobble" is applied randomly. So each character is slightly altered from what she wrote. Her original stroke actually never shows up anywhere, which is kinda funny to think about.
Letter spacing, word spacing, line spacing (y pos), line starting point (xpos), and baseline drift are all random as well.
I don't know how to write and or use a GAN model so I didn't. Maybe next time!
Over the past few months, we've been playing with the Axidraw to bootstrap a handwritten card service, so I loved reading about the way you solved some similar problems – especially the jigs. For us, this has been much more challenging than expected...thanks for sharing your process, it was encouraging.
For what it's worth, we're making FountainCards.com, which will be the easiest way to send a card written in fountain pen. If anyone is up for trying out the beta, my email is [email protected].
Glad you enjoyed it. I feel like the jigs were one of my best inventions. Especially the pen alignment jig that gave me a reference point for dead reckoning. When I figured that out I was pretty tickled. Good luck, reach out if you need anything!
I love them. But suddenly 15 years went past, and when I opened up my Parker 45, the ink reservoir plastic had perished.
I've bought a number of replacement wells, but none of them work. They use a screw to draw the ink, which gets the ink into the reservoir OK, but it doesn't flow, presumably because there is no ventilation?
In Texas, the county puts a value on your house that then determines how much you pay in taxes.
Usually they just kinda eyeball it. The homeowner is allowed to protest and say "hey that's super wrong, I protest!" It's a pretty broken system tbh.
We are property tax agents that homeowners hire to do that "protesting" process for them. IF we save them money, we get paid a percentage of the realized savings. If we save them nothing, we get paid $0.00, so it's a pretty compelling offer.
As for conversions, it's extremely hard to track because it's physical mail. But yes, the campaign did quite well!
It looks like the pen plotter has 3 degrees of freedom, I'm just curious if you think adding any more would possibly have any benefits?
I've got a very cheap robot arm, I plan to teach to draw sometime, but I don't think it's going to work well, partially because the lowest servos don't seem to have enough torque and I don't think it's especially accurate/repeatable.
It has ~2.5 degrees of freedom. The pen servo only controls the up part of the vertical axis, gravity controls the down. What I mean to say is that the pen carriage just slides down, it is not pulled down.
To solve for that we used... rubberbands. It adds a little extra downward force to ensure the ink flows.
This is so cool! I live in Houston and make a dashboard every year to help friends/family/colleagues find comps and negotiate their property tax rates. I had thought about direct mailing out drafts of info packets to people as a side-hustle, but never put in the work to make it happen.
Nice, it would make a great side hustle if you have a flexible enough job to attend the hearings! Or if your angle was strictly preparing packets for homeowners to attend their own hearings. I say go for it
Finally the machine from Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is possible:-)
Joking aside I find this highly fascinating. Especially since (apart from applications like the one in Kafka's story) the results from a good printer are probably practically indistinguishable for most people. Handwriting robots are one example of a technology that became good enough and useless at the same time. They are fun though and I love to see them in action. (OK, not the Kafka one but the one one from article certainly).
I guess this might be for future iterations... But.. aren't variations in inclination, pressure and stroke (direction and order of strokes) super important for handwriting? How would you handle these - especially pressure.
Yes you are absolutely correct! That's the biggest flaw in this system IMO. And I don't think it's fixable without a fundamental redesign. The pressure is controlled by a rubberband. I could possibly use the servo to relieve pressure during certain strokes, but how much? I don't know how tall the paper is! It could be a ten sheet packet or an envelope. And to simulate pressure differences we're talking about fractions of a millimeter there. I can't crack it!
Instead of using a vacuum to directly place a sheet of paper, instead automate the placement of jigs. Design the jigs with self-locating features so they can be placed by a relatively inaccurate system.
[+] [-] joshuaellinger|4 years ago|reply
The handwriting on the outside does make it look personal but, once you open it, it is obviously computer generated due to the consistency of the writing. If anything, I'd say the writing in inside undermined the message because nobody is going to handwrite a letter to solicit that business. You should test only doing the signature only and see if impacts your response rate.
We also got a couple of 'we want to buy your home' mailings. It does feel like it impacts our open rate but I can't tell if it is just due to novelty.
I think the main reason it 'works' as a business proposition is that the City is doing blanket increases and relying on protests to catch their mistakes. They do this (in part) because they are forbidden from using actual MLS data. It costs me 3-4 hours to do a protest so outsourcing it makes sense if your time is valuable. But when it came down to it, I wasn't willing to let them represent me -- something about it felt off -- and I wound up just accepting the increase.
The system doesn't feel broken -- just wasteful. How else are you going to do a property tax? I do wonder if this goes the way of medical billing (overcharge at first because you know you are going to lose some to protests) or it creates a watchdog effect that make the City limit the increases to an amount that is not likely to draw protests.
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
Re: the system. I can't disagree there. It's a disaster and there has to be a better way. Counties rely on a certain percentage of people protesting and the ones that don't get kinda screwed imo. The unfortunate truth is that everyone should protest every year. That's a broken system. Some other states only revalue every third year, so the counties have a better shot at fairly valuing everything because they have 1/3rd the workload. Not Texas though. They revalue everything every year, so it all just gets ballparked.
[+] [-] grifball|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CosmicShadow|4 years ago|reply
The fact that you have to keep replacing the sheet and realigning is definitely a drag, but we made a system that worked well enough for us. Making the SVG letters is a pain and we are working on designing our own font from my wife's handwriting, but you can at least SVGize a picture of your writing and then touch it up in an editor.
Gives a good excuse to buy lots of different fun pens and paper, but yeah it's annoying when a pen stops writing half a letter and I'm not sure if it's just an ink thing or a pressure thing.
We've gotten positive reviews that mention our handwritten notes at least and lots of comments on great service and such, so we think it makes a difference.
[+] [-] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
So depending on your use case your time might be better spend on improving the handwriting->vector pipeline instead of designing a font (not that that isn't fun too)
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
Seriously though, Axidraws rule. Glad it's working for y'all.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
In China, some kids use automatic writing machines to do their homework.
[1] https://youtu.be/3FHGO2i0bL4
[+] [-] maddyboo|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LongPen
[+] [-] hamburgerwah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
These letters are sent to homeowners, who then hire us, and we go in person to the appraisal district to represent the homeowner.
[+] [-] lvs|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sverhagen|4 years ago|reply
This seems like a problem solvable with just software, i.e. introducing artificial variations in the fonts. Why the seemingly overly complicated jump to using real pens in a plotter?
It's the font improvements that could possibly fool me, not the indentation of a real pen.
[+] [-] jahewson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|4 years ago|reply
Of course, doing anything is better than having the two e's in "meet" be identical, which spoils it being real handwriting from the get-go.
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
The reason you get crappy printed mail that's obviously a fake is because it's cheap and easy. Not everyone wants to build robots.
[+] [-] pvitz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] air7|4 years ago|reply
The difficulty and tediousness of the action is precisely what gives it it's perceived value in the eyes of the receiver.
And while it's arguable that building such an elaborate contraption to mimic handwriting is in itself a signal of the importance of the communication, it still gives off a sense of disingenuousness to me.
[+] [-] teddyh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] max0563|4 years ago|reply
https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/writer-automata-pierre-...
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phgn|4 years ago|reply
I understand that handwritten letters might receive a bit more attention, but doesn't it come across as unprofessional? It would for me - I would assume they don't have the money to properly print at least the address fields.
[+] [-] JohnWhigham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retSava|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|4 years ago|reply
What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
We tried a bunch of different pens and eventually ended up on G2 for reliability and "rollability," if thats a thing. Way fewer dead spots than some of the other pens. Also, we could see remaining ink and swap out early.
> What's the difference with an off the shelve pen plotter?
It's bigger!
Seriously though, this was an off the shelf pen plotter (Axidraw) until I blew up one of the axes. So it's the same controller, same motors, same pen carriage, and one of the same arms. We simply took one axes and made it super long.
[+] [-] soheil|4 years ago|reply
It'd be probably more realistic if it included random noise or used a GAN model to generate a unique looking letter every time.
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
So it does introduce random variation. I had the employee write each letter ~15 times, and then they are plucked at random and then more "wobble" is applied randomly. So each character is slightly altered from what she wrote. Her original stroke actually never shows up anywhere, which is kinda funny to think about.
Letter spacing, word spacing, line spacing (y pos), line starting point (xpos), and baseline drift are all random as well.
I don't know how to write and or use a GAN model so I didn't. Maybe next time!
[+] [-] iambateman|4 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, we're making FountainCards.com, which will be the easiest way to send a card written in fountain pen. If anyone is up for trying out the beta, my email is [email protected].
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
Glad you enjoyed it. I feel like the jigs were one of my best inventions. Especially the pen alignment jig that gave me a reference point for dead reckoning. When I figured that out I was pretty tickled. Good luck, reach out if you need anything!
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
I love them. But suddenly 15 years went past, and when I opened up my Parker 45, the ink reservoir plastic had perished.
I've bought a number of replacement wells, but none of them work. They use a screw to draw the ink, which gets the ink into the reservoir OK, but it doesn't flow, presumably because there is no ventilation?
What fountain pen mechanism are you using?
Do you know of a way to rejuvenate a Parker 45?
[+] [-] drKarl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipsum2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
Usually they just kinda eyeball it. The homeowner is allowed to protest and say "hey that's super wrong, I protest!" It's a pretty broken system tbh.
We are property tax agents that homeowners hire to do that "protesting" process for them. IF we save them money, we get paid a percentage of the realized savings. If we save them nothing, we get paid $0.00, so it's a pretty compelling offer.
As for conversions, it's extremely hard to track because it's physical mail. But yes, the campaign did quite well!
[+] [-] anfractuosity|4 years ago|reply
It looks like the pen plotter has 3 degrees of freedom, I'm just curious if you think adding any more would possibly have any benefits?
I've got a very cheap robot arm, I plan to teach to draw sometime, but I don't think it's going to work well, partially because the lowest servos don't seem to have enough torque and I don't think it's especially accurate/repeatable.
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
It has ~2.5 degrees of freedom. The pen servo only controls the up part of the vertical axis, gravity controls the down. What I mean to say is that the pen carriage just slides down, it is not pulled down.
To solve for that we used... rubberbands. It adds a little extra downward force to ensure the ink flows.
[+] [-] alach11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|4 years ago|reply
Joking aside I find this highly fascinating. Especially since (apart from applications like the one in Kafka's story) the results from a good printer are probably practically indistinguishable for most people. Handwriting robots are one example of a technology that became good enough and useless at the same time. They are fun though and I love to see them in action. (OK, not the Kafka one but the one one from article certainly).
[+] [-] bschwindHN|4 years ago|reply
At least that's what jumped into my head because I still send my Grandma letters. Don't want to automate it though :)
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
That's really wonderful that you still send your grandma cards. I guarantee you she saves every one.
[+] [-] bigiain|4 years ago|reply
(Not mine, I just remembered and googled it...)
[+] [-] Keyframe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjk166|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aarondf|4 years ago|reply
I did watch a bunch of vacuum robot videos on YouTube tho, that was fun.