The imitation of cursive handwriting is mainly limited to generating handwritten words or lines. Multiple synthetic outputs must be stitched together to create paragraphs or whole pages, whereby consistency and layout information are lost. To close this gap, we propose a method for imitating handwriting at the paragraph level that also works for unseen writing styles. Therefore, we introduce a modified latent diffusion model that enriches the encoder-decoder mechanism with specialized loss functions that explicitly preserve the style and content. We enhance the attention mechanism of the diffusion model with adaptive 2D positional encoding and the conditioning mechanism to work with two modalities simultaneously: a style image and the target text. This significantly improves the realism of the generated handwriting. We set a new benchmark in our comprehensive evaluation, achieving 61 % mAP and 56 % top-1 accuracy in style preservation, significantly outperforming the previous best method (37 % mAP, 30 % top-1). We are making our code publicly available for reproducibility, supporting research in this area and research into potential countermeasures: https://github.com/M4rt1nM4yr/paragraph_handwriting_imitation_ldm
Handwritten text generation (HTG) conditioned on writer style has been widely studied for Latin scripts, but remains underexplored for low-resource and non-Latin writing systems, leaving open how well existing models generalise beyond the Latin domain. Cyrillic, particularly Ukrainian, lacks both large-scale writer-labeled datasets and empirical evidence of such generalisation. To address this gap, we construct a Ukrainian handwritten word dataset of 126,177 images from 308 writers using connected-component segmentation, quality filtering, and targeted oversampling of underrepresented Ukrainian characters. We retrain DiffusionPen, a MobileNetV2 triplet-loss style encoder with a CANINE-conditioned latent diffusion U-Net, on this dataset without architectural modification, testing direct transfer from Latin to Cyrillic. We evaluate cross-domain style transfer in three settings: cross-lingual transfer from IAM English samples, zero-shot transfer to an early 20th-century Ukrainian manuscript, and few-shot imitation of contemporary writers. The model produces legible, style-consistent word images, indicating that few-shot latent diffusion models generalize beyond the Latin-script domain. We release the dataset, trained models, and evaluation protocol as a reproducible benchmark for writer-aware Cyrillic HTG, providing a foundation for extending stylized HTG to other underrepresented writing systems.
Realistic online handwriting depends not only on individual character shapes, but also on how a writer connects, spaces, and aligns adjacent characters. Existing methods rely primarily on long-range sequence modeling and capture these inter-character behaviors only implicitly. This often produces plausible glyphs accompanied by broken cursive joins, inconsistent spacing, or writer-inconsistent transitions. We introduce BoundInk, a writer-conditioned framework that treats inter-character boundaries as explicit generation units. By jointly modeling local transitions and surrounding text context, BoundInk preserves writer-specific glyph appearance while improving connectivity and spacing across complete text lines. We further introduce a boundary-aware evaluation framework that directly assesses cursive continuity and spatial relationships between characters beyond conventional trajectory similarity. Across three benchmark-matched settings, BoundInk improves all applicable boundary-quality measures and reduces normalized dynamic time warping by 17.6--47.8%. In blind human evaluations, BoundInk outputs are preferred in 78.0--82.6% of valid criterion-wise judgments.
Recent handwritten text generators can reproduce a writer's style from publicly available references, posing risks of document forgery and identity misuse. An attacker may use a publicly available handwritten note or signature sample to generate forged recommendation letters or authorization forms, leading to document fraud, identity misuse, and misleading decisions. However, existing protections against unauthorized image editing or synthesis transfer poorly to handwriting style mimicry. Designed for natural images with complex backgrounds, they often optimize perturbations over the whole image. For sparse handwriting images, such global perturbations become conspicuous in blank background regions and largely degrade the visual quality. In this work, we propose InkShield, a proactive writing-style defense that protects reference images before release. InkShield selects a decoy writer to define a style-displacement direction, optimizes perturbations with a frozen handwriting-generation surrogate, and confines them to ink-stroke edges to avoid conspicuous background artifacts. On IAM, the average Top-1/Top-5 rates at which generated samples are retrieved as the target writer by two independent writer evaluators decrease from 11.94%/36.52% to 2.03%/8.79%. Meanwhile, the protected references remain visually close to the originals (LPIPS 0.0078), and the generated text remains readable. InkShield also exhibits transferability to other handwriting generators. Overall, InkShield provides practical protection against unauthorized handwriting style mimicry.