Your handwriting, as a real font
Copy a short sheet of characters onto blank paper and photograph it. Handwrite builds an installable font in your own hand: proper spacing, bold, italic, and letters that vary like real writing.
Everything runs inside your browser. Nothing you write or photograph leaves it, and there is no account.
Each letter's bearings are measured from its own ink profile, so round, flat and diagonal shapes look equally spaced.
Every character is built in three subtly different versions that rotate as you type, so "letter" doesn't show three identical t's.
All four styles are generated from your single sample, so bold and italic work properly in any app.
No account, no upload, no server. The font is built on your machine and saved straight to your downloads.
Try it here
Below is the tracer itself, the same function that builds the font, on ink you draw in this tab. Every number it reports is counted from its own output.
This part needs a pointer and a canvas. The full flow does not: it starts from a photograph of paper, and works the same way.
The process
The app shows you about 120 characters. Write them on any blank paper with any dark pen, leaving a gap between them. No printer, no special paper.
Shoot straight down in ordinary light. Page rotation and uneven lighting are corrected automatically; the photo only has to be readable.
Every character it found is shown back to you. Redraw any that came out wrong, then type a sentence and move the sliders until the spacing feels like your hand.
Download all four styles as one zip and install them like any other font. They share a family name, so Bold and Italic work normally in every app.
Under the hood
Four things separate a convincing handwriting font from the ones that read as a ransom note.
Most handwriting fonts give every letter the same margin. A round o already carries space in its own curve where a flat H carries none, so equal margins leave one loose and the other cramped.
Handwrite measures the ink profile of every character and sets its bearings so the perceived gap comes out equal. On a real layout engine, ordinary prose shifts by under 1.5%, while a deliberately awkward line like AVATAR To Wave off; r. tightens by 5%.
Type a double L in a typical handwriting font and you get the same shape stamped twice. Real writing never does that, and the eye catches it immediately.
Every character is built in three subtly different versions, rotated as you type by a standard OpenType feature, so the word letter shows three different t's. It is on by default and can be switched off anywhere.
Blank paper has no ruled line, so there is nothing to align letters to. Guess it and everything floats.
The app knows which characters it asked for: p drops below the line, k rises above it. Solving those constraints across a whole row at once recovers the baseline far more reliably than any single letter could, and it happens per row, so writing that drifts in size down the page still comes out even.
Ask a word processor to bold a font that has no bold and it smears the outline sideways.
Handwrite builds Bold and Italic from your single sample: outlines thickened along their own edges, and leaned about the middle of the x-height so the line keeps its rhythm. Markdown and rich text behave properly.
Questions
All you need is paper, a pen, and a camera.
Already have a handwriting font? and get the other three styles.
Any paper, any dark pen. Write each character once, left to right, with a clear gap between them, and keep the rows well separated. The first sheet is enough on its own — about thirty characters, and you have a font. Come back for the others whenever you like.
Start with the first one — on its own it makes a font you can install and type in. The rest can wait until you want them. Lay the paper flat in even light and shoot straight down; slight rotation and uneven lighting are corrected automatically.
These are the shapes Handwrite found. Anything that looks wrong can be redrawn — click it.
Type anything. Adjust until it feels like your hand.
All four styles, web fonts, a stylesheet and installation notes.
The styles, as separate files.
Paste this into your stylesheet. The woff folder in the zip has the files.
There is no link to your font — it was never uploaded anywhere, so there is nothing to link to. This copies a link to the app.
Working
Everything is happening on your device.
Nothing is sent automatically. Write what happened, check the details beside this, then copy the report — the GitHub page that opens is an empty issue form, so nothing reaches GitHub until you paste it in and post it yourself. You can also keep the copy and send it however you like instead.
This link goes to a site we do not run.
Once you are there, this app has no part in what happens — its privacy policy, its cookies and its content are its own. Nothing about your work is carried across; no referrer is sent.
Four steps, about ten minutes, and nothing you write or photograph leaves this browser.
These choices are written to this browser's own storage and nowhere else. What's stored?