Well, for starters, it's an art form, much like painting and sculpture. If you're good enough, your works could be valuable. If you're a cleric, than its useful for writing scripture, like so.
So for the average adventurer, or the average munchkin gamer...
absolutely nothin', say it again...
most dangerous skill in the game: you can use it when making wish scrolls.
other than that, good for rogues trying to forge documentation to go with their disguise, wizards who like neat spellbooks, that sort of thing. oracles should pick this up too so they can write a book of their divine revolations and sell it for $$$ to the church. sorcerers can use it if they're pretending to be wizards. barbarians can use it for runic tribal warpaint... ok, at this point i'm running dry on ideas.
As a house rule, I give it to all wizards as a freebie, one rank for every level they take in Wizard.
As for what it's good for? Neat spellbooks, certainly, but also forgery and recognizing other people's handwriting.
If you also invest in some Knowledge: Nobility, Local or Religion, you can improve your odds of finding a patron for your skills that has some coin to toss around on 'frivolous' luxury items like elaborately illuminated manuscripts of family histories, biographies, etc.
Now the sneaky thing would be to use this sort of angle to get access to the back story of people in positions of power or influence...
Plus creating forgeries or copies of legal documents, religious texts, scholarly works, yadda yadda yadda.
If you add some ranks in Knowledge: History, Linguistics and perhaps some ranks in alchemy, you might be able to forge historic documents.
Awesome, or useless, depending entirely on context.
You can use it as your skill roll (instead of Spellcraft) when making scrolls.
Two words: Magical Tattoos
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forgery is part of the linguistics skill
Create or Detect Forgeries: Forgery requires writing materials appropriate to the document being forged. To forge a document on which the handwriting is not specific to a person, you need only to have seen a similar document before, and you gain a +8 bonus on your check. To forge a signature, you need an autograph of that person to copy, and you gain a +4 bonus on the check. To forge a longer document written in the hand of some particular person, a large sample of that person's handwriting is needed.
The Linguistics check is made secretly, so that you're not sure how good your forgery is. As with Disguise, you don't make a check until someone examines the work. Your Linguistics check is opposed by the Linguistics check of the person who examines the document to verify its authenticity. The examiner gains modifiers if any of the conditions are listed on the table above.
So, it is just another craft skill like craft: basket making.
It is only as useful as your GM says..
Technically you could use it with the master craftsman feat to create magic items. The funny part is that per RAW, you could craft magic arms and armor with that feat and craft: calligraphy....
Calligraphy isn't treated the same way as painting, but is a big part of the culture.
Going off what Happler said, you could indeed create magic items with that feat. A good DM is going to clarify that you need an appropriate Craft skill to use that feat. (Though there is historical precedent for paper armor.
Now, the item I created for RPG Superstar would use that feat nicely, because it requires ranks in Craft(calligraphy) to create. It's over here in the thread about items that didn't make the cut.
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Going off what Happler said, you could indeed create magic items with that feat. A good DM is going to clarify that you need an appropriate Craft skill to use that feat. (Though there is historical precedent for paper armor.
Oh, I agree, just commenting about pure RAW...