Oh my God. What is this, and where can I get one?
3 Likes
obligs:
1 Like
4 Likes
You can have the pen (nib?) honed for left-hand use. Taking into account which way (angle) you hold a pen. Doesn’t work with all types of pen, though.
Honing and polishing pens actually used to be a profession, like repairing umbrellas, in the days before mass production of consumer goods. Hardcore fountain pen enthusiasts usually know somebody who can still do this or, more recently, have taught themselves how to do it. It’s an interesting subculture. Sometimes a bit on the pretentious side, but usually nice people. And if needs be you can always ward them off with a squeaky felt-tip pen.
Twenty years or so ago a guy I used to know had a bespoke fountain pen made in Japan to his specifications. There was a quite a bit of back and forth via e-mail to sort out which writing style he had, how he held a pen, how much pressure he used, and so on.
Anyway, the end result was a simply beautiful, minimalist elegant lacquered fountain pen with the nib cut and honed just so.
Cost him a couple of hundred € IIRC. Say, pretty much what you’d pay for a mid-range Montblanc or OMAS off the shelf.
I can’t remember the name of the company. Well-known brand for writing implements. They had a little department of old geezers way past retirement age who shuffled back into the factory each day to do custom jobs like this for fun and to preserve the skills. Japan has form on this sort of thing, so they might be still at it.
As an alternative to The Da Vinci Method (book title!) @smulder has mentioned already:
One of my colleagues, an architect, has developed a writing style where she rotates the paper and holds the pen in a way that she is writing effectively vertically. Flawless.
5 Likes
I do that when forced to use a US keyboard layout instead of UK. Too many devices assume that US=English and don’t give you an option to change before they demand your email address, and leave my dyslexic brain to work out why they don’t think example"example.com is a real email address.
6 Likes
Interesting! I am ever so slightly ambidextrous so i can write a bit with my right hand, but never fully committed to it or had a burning desire to use a fancy fountain pen anyway. I’m not surprised a sub-culture of honed fountain pen nib enthusiasts exists though. I’m moderately successful doing the Da Vinci method and it’s fun to do, but readability suffers so it’s limited to the writing equivalent of doodling during a spare five minutes.
2 Likes
If you want that co-pilot you have to find a little plastic tube and blow in it.
Shift+F5 is not a reserved shortcut in Windows 11. It should be available to apps. Are you on a laptop, and does it have the “display mode” hotkey on the F5 key?
You might need to press Shift+Fn+F5 to get Shift+F5, or turn your Fn lock on (however that’s done on yours, for some it’s Fn+ESC or another key, others it’s a setting somewhere) if you want to use the function keys by default.
I was testing this in a Win 11 VM on my Mac, and I’m seeing behavior similar to yours. Fn keys on a MacBook will do stuff like brightness, volume, etc. by default unless you change it in macOS keyboard settings. If I press the globe/Fn key and the F-key it passes it through to Win 11, and Shift+F5 does not open the display options for me.
1 Like
Hmm, when I liked your post with “that” emoji, I thought I might have done the wrong thing.
And then I realised it was perfectly apt.
1 Like
Thank you! It’s an Acer laptop, and yes, F5 does seem to be a “display mode” hotkey.
It didn’t matter how I set the Photoshop keys, the laptop settings always override it again.
Still, I can probably set one of the shortcut keys for my Wacom pen as a workaround, as I still haven’t quite settled on which buttons of that I need as which shortcut.
Thanks for giving me a hint on where to try next 
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
