Type it, get handwriting

How a page gets written

This tool does not use an installed font for your own handwriting. It draws each letter straight from the strokes saved in your project, one at a time, onto a canvas shaped like an A4 sheet. That is what lets it do two things a plain font cannot: alternate between your two variants of a letter, and give every letter its own tiny tilt.

The bundled fonts (Caveat, Allura, Shadows Into Light, Kalam and the others in the list) are drawn the same way, character by character, so the Variation slider treats them identically. Words are wrapped to the margins you set, and a blank line in your text becomes a blank line on the page.

What each slider really does

Variation

From 0 to 100%. At 0 every letter sits perfectly on the line. At 35%, the default, each letter drifts a few units off the baseline and tilts up to about 1.5 degrees. At 100% the wobble is large enough to look careless.

Text size

28 to 80 px on a 1,240 px wide page. A size of 46 gives about 20 lines of copy on a page with the default margin and spacing.

Page margin

60 to 260 px on all four sides. Wide margins make a page look like a letter; narrow ones look like a notebook.

Line spacing

1.1 to 2.4 times the text size. The ruled lines on the Lines and Warm papers follow it, so your baseline always sits on a rule.

Letter spacing

−10 to 40 units added after every glyph, the same scale as the maker's spacing slider.

Choosing the paper

Lines gives pale blue rules and a red margin line, the way school paper looks. Grid draws square-ruled paper, handy for maths or for diagrams you will add later. Plain is white with nothing on it, which is the best base if you plan to place the page into a document. Warm paper is a cream sheet with ruled lines in brown and a faint darkening at the edges, so it reads as aged paper rather than a screen.

Ink colours start with five choices, from near-black to blue, burgundy and green, and a colour picker takes care of anything else. Blue-black on warm paper is the combination that most often reads as genuinely handwritten.

Preparing your text

Write paragraphs with a blank line between them and the page keeps that gap. Avoid pasting text that contains symbols you never drew, such as curly quotes or accented letters, because those will be faded fallbacks. If a long passage needs to fit a single page, raise the line spacing last: reducing the text size or the margin changes the look less than squeezing the lines together.

Ending with a signature

Save a signature in the signature tool and it appears in the Sign off with menu. It is placed under the last line of the final page, on the right margin, as a transparent image, so it sits on the paper style you chose rather than on a white box.

Where this works and where it doesn't

• Only letters you have drawn appear in your own hand. Capitals and punctuation need the optional sets in the maker.
• There are no ligatures or joined cursive; every letter is separate, so long flowing words look printed rather than joined.
• The output is an image. It cannot be searched, and it should not be presented as something you wrote when you did not, for example where a handwritten submission is required.
• Changing the font switcher does not change your saved project. It only changes how this page is drawn.

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