Write the letter a in the box with a finger, mouse or stylus. Twenty-five more and you have a real .ttf font made from your own hand, built inside this browser tab and free to download.
Pick the route that matches how you like to write. All three end in the same place: glyphs saved in a project on your device, and a font you can download.
Lane one
Best on an iPad, a touch laptop or with a steady mouse. Each letter gets a large box with the ascender, x-height, baseline and descender lines printed in. You get undo, redo, three pen widths and a faint ghost letter for size reference, and every stroke autosaves.
Start drawingLane two
Best when you want real ink on real paper. The standard template fits 42 writing cells on an A4 page, or 36 on US Letter. Write one letter per box with a dark pen, photograph the sheet, and the scanner straightens it from four corner marks, slices it into cells and traces each one.
Print the templateLane three
Practice five classic cursive hands, from Spencerian to Zaner-Bloser, over a big pale letter. A coverage score tells you how much of it you reached and whether you stayed on it, and one button turns your tracing into a new font project.
Open the copybookThe whole pipeline is three steps, and the first one decides how good the font looks.
The drawing box is a fixed 5 by 6 rectangle. The baseline sits 70% of the way down, so a letter you draw on it lands at the same height in the finished font as it did on screen. The printed template uses the same proportions, which is why scanned cells drop straight into place.
Single letters hide problems. The preview sets “a little note made by you” in your drawings, with sliders for letter spacing and size and a per-letter nudge for baseline and scale. A letter that floats or looks too big shows up here, not after export.
Your strokes become outlines and are written as a TrueType file at 1,000 units per em, with your project name in the font name table. The bundled demo alphabet exports as 28 glyphs in about 21 KB. The file is made in the browser and never sent anywhere.
Ascender · b d f h k l reach here
x-height · a c e m n o stop here
Baseline · every letter sits on this
Descender · g j p q y drop here
Twenty-six lowercase letters unlock the export. They are not all the same height, and knowing which is which saves a lot of redrawing. Tall letters share an ascender line, five letters hang below the baseline, and the rest stay at x-height.
Uppercase adds 26 more glyphs and digits-and-marks adds 23 (the ten digits plus . , ! ? ' " - : ; ( ) & @), for 75 in total. Both are optional, can be added any time, and land in the same project and the same downloaded file.
Try the four handwriting fonts bundled with the site. Once you have drawn all 26 lowercase letters in the maker, a fifth button appears with your own font on it, built from your saved project.
A good test sentence uses the letters you are unsure about. Type your own name, a word with a double letter such as “coffee”, and something with a descender like “jumping”. Spacing problems and letters that sit too high or too low show up in words much sooner than in a single box.
a little note made by you
The four presets are bundled with the site. Draw all 26 lowercase letters in the maker and your own font appears here.
Thanks for dinner. Same time next week?
Same words, same line. The handwritten side is Caveat, one of the fonts bundled with the site; your own font replaces it once you have drawn the letters.
Every card below is a working tool that reads the same saved font, so you pick it once and it follows you from page to page.
Install the .ttf and set a letter in any app that imports fonts, or design a card, place card or social post right here in the card maker.
Paste text, pick lined, grid or warm paper and get pages that look written by hand, with small per-letter wobble and a signature at the end.
Type a name in your glyphs or a bundled script, or draw it, and export a transparent PNG you can place on a document.
Practice sets for five classic cursive hands, each with a big ghost letter and a coverage score, and a route into your own font.
A font file only helps in software that lets you load fonts. Here is the short list, so you do not find out after the fact.
| Where | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Word, desktop | Works | Install the font on the computer, restart Word, pick it from the list. |
| Canva | Paid plans only | Uploading your own font is part of a paid plan. |
| Google Docs | Does not work | Docs does not accept uploaded font files. |
| WhatsApp, Instagram chats | Does not work | Chat apps send plain text; the receiver's phone decides how it looks. |
Apps change their rules. Check the app's current font policy before you plan around one of these.
Photographing your writing gives you a picture of those exact words. A font gives you the alphabet.
Which to choose depends on how much you will write. A single sentence for a single card is easiest as a photograph. Anything you will write more than a few times, resize, translate or correct is better as a font, because the text stays text and your handwriting comes along with it.
Handwriting-font tools differ a lot in what the free version actually gives you. Checked in November 2026 against each tool's own free tier; a dash means we did not compare that point.
| Tool | Account required | Free download limit | Export paywall | Where glyphs are processed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This site | No | None beyond the sets you draw (up to 75) | None | On your device |
| Calligraphr (free plan) | Yes, registration | 75 characters, 1 font, no ligatures | — | — |
| FontMaker.co (free) | — | 26 characters | — | — |
| Handfont (app) | — | — | .ttf export is paywalled | — |
We are not affiliated with these tools. Plans change; check each site before deciding.
The ones people ask before they draw a single letter.
Yes. The .ttf you export holds every letter you drew: up to 75 characters if you fill all three sets (26 lowercase, 26 uppercase, 23 digits and marks). There is no account, no watermark, no character cap beyond what you draw, and no paid tier in this version.
No. There is nothing to register for. Your projects are saved in your own browser as you draw, and the font is built there too, so the site never needs to know who you are.
In IndexedDB inside this browser profile, on this device. It is not on our servers. Clearing site data for this domain deletes it, and another browser or phone will not see it, so export the .ttf whenever you want a copy that travels.
A TrueType .ttf. Before we offer the download we read the file's first four bytes and only label it .ttf if they are 00 01 00 00, which is the TrueType signature. We never rename an OpenType file to .ttf.
Yes. Drawing uses pointer events, so a finger, mouse, stylus or Apple Pencil all work. The part that differs on iPad is installing the finished font, which needs a font-installer app; the GoodNotes and iPad guide walks through it.
Each letter is its own drawing, so size, slant and stroke weight drift unless you anchor them. Sit every letter on the baseline, keep the same pen width, and use the per-letter nudge to fix the outliers. Uneven is also part of why a font looks handwritten.
Yes. The handwriting is yours, and this site claims no rights over fonts you export. If you traced over a font made by someone else, their licence still applies to that shape, so draw your own letters if you plan to sell.
Not in this version. Every letter is a single glyph. You can draw a second variant per letter, and the live preview and the handwritten-pages tool alternate between them, but the exported font file uses your main drawing only.
No to both. Google Docs does not accept uploaded fonts, and chat apps send plain text, so a font file cannot change how a message looks to the person receiving it. Word on a desktop computer does work once the font is installed.
The 26 lowercase letters unlock the export. Uppercase and the digits-and-marks set are optional extras you can add to the same project later, and they go into the same file.
Not yet. The character sets are a to z, A to Z, the digits 0 to 9 and thirteen marks (. , ! ? ' " - : ; ( ) & @). Accented letters and non-Latin scripts are not part of this version.
Not directly. Neither app turns your handwritten strokes into a font. You make the font here, install it on the iPad, and then use it for typed text in the apps' text boxes. We are not affiliated with either app.
On an iPad and want it in GoodNotes? Read the GoodNotes and iPad guide.
The first box is the same one at the top of this page. It takes about a minute to write the letter a and see how the guide lines feel.
Open the maker