In this paper, a new method for off-line writer verifica- tion and identification is proposed which encodes writer features as a mix of typical handwriting styles, written by so-called vantage writers. Since their handwriting can be shown to the user, the method provides a degree of trans- parency that is usually not present in automatic verification and identification systems. It acts as a dimensionality re- duction of a precomputed basic feature vector. In this exper- iment, the hinge feature was used. The method was tested with unconstrained connected cursive text in two datasets: a known dataset of 252 writers and 1074 writers from a new, forensic dataset.