About this site

The idea

A font is a set of outlines plus a table saying how wide each one is. Your handwriting, drawn on a screen or scanned from paper, can be turned into exactly that. Browsers are now powerful enough to do the whole conversion locally: they can store a project, widen strokes into shapes, trace a scanned page, assemble a TrueType file and load it back for a preview. So that is how this site works, and it is why it can be free with nothing held back.

For scale: the smallest complete font we ship, the demo alphabet, is 28 glyphs and about 21 KB. A photograph of the same writing would be larger, could not be typed into, and would blur when enlarged. The font is the compact form of what the photograph shows.

The goal for the maker is modest and specific. A first-time visitor should be able to write a single letter within seconds of landing on the page, see the guide lines that make letters line up, and leave with a font that renders correctly in desktop Word.

Why everything stays local

Handwriting is personal. A set of your letters can be used to imitate your signature, and a photo of a handwritten page can contain things you did not mean to share. Rather than promise to handle that carefully on a server, the site avoids receiving it at all. Strokes, scans, fonts and typed text are never sent to our servers. The only data that reaches us is page requests and anonymous event counts, described in the privacy policy.

The trade-off is real. Because nothing is on a server, nothing syncs between your devices, and we cannot recover a project you deleted. That is why the maker shows a Saved state, why export is one click, and why the home page tells you plainly where your font lives.

What it is built with

The pages are rendered with Next.js on Vercel. The font engine is a small set of open-source libraries plus features that ship in every modern browser.

fonteditor-core · Writes the TrueType file

Takes the outlines we compute and produces the .ttf with its tables and name record.

polygon-clipping · Merges overlapping strokes

Turns many round-ended stroke shapes into one clean outline per letter.

imagetracerjs · Traces scanned cells

Converts a thresholded bitmap of your pen strokes into vector contours.

IndexedDB and FontFace · Browser built-ins

Store your projects locally and load the font file back so you can type in it.

The handwriting fonts you can preview with (Caveat, Allura, Shadows Into Light, Kalam) and the display fonts used on the site (Playfair Display, Pinyon Script, Inter) are released under the SIL Open Font License and are served from this site's own domain. None of them is part of a font you export; your file contains only your letters.

How we check our own work

Claims on this site come from runs we can repeat. The exported font is checked on every export: its first four bytes must be 00 01 00 00 before it is called a .ttf, its name table must carry your project name, and it is loaded back into the browser to render your preview text from the file itself. The scanner was tested on pages generated and re-uploaded by script, and the numbers are on the template page together with the caveat that they are synthetic.

Testing also changes the product. When we ran a generated page through the plain-page mode, our own demo y came out as two separate shapes, because it is drawn with a pen lift. That is why the tool now merges stacked pieces automatically and offers a join button when it guesses wrong.

What it doesn't do

• It does not make cursive joins or ligatures. Every letter is a separate glyph.
• It does not support accented letters or non-Latin scripts yet: a to z, A to Z, digits and thirteen marks.
• It cannot put a font into Google Docs or a chat app, and it says so rather than implying otherwise.
• It does not recognise your handwriting as text. Scanning places glyphs by position, and you label shapes yourself in the plain-page mode.
• It does not keep accounts, so there is no sign-in, no cloud copy and no recovery.

What comes next

The font maker, the printable template and the scanner are finished, and so are the tools built on the same glyph engine: handwritten pages, a signature generator with a library, cursive copybooks, a card maker and a font viewer. Not built yet are a stamp maker and signing documents, which the Create hub shows greyed out as later ideas rather than pretending they exist. If one of those matters to you, tell us why; the reasons people give decide what gets finished first.