Convert Text to Handwriting

There are three ways a computer turns typed text into something that looks handwritten, and they give very different results. This page uses the first two. It draws your text in a handwriting font that someone designed from real writing, then varies each letter so the page does not look printed. It cannot learn your writing from a photo, but if you have turned your own writing into a font, you can load that under Fine-tune.

The third way is handwriting synthesis: a neural network trained on recordings of pen strokes generates new strokes for each word, so no two letters are ever the same. Alex Graves showed this in 2013, training on the IAM online handwriting database, and browser demos such as Calligrapher.ai are built on that idea. The writing looks more natural, but you get less control over the page and it works best in English.

The quickest giveaway of a handwriting font is repetition. Every e is the same shape at the same height, every line is ruler straight and every word gap is identical. Real writing wanders. So each letter here gets its own small random turn, height change, size change and ink strength, each line drifts slightly up or down and starts a fraction off the margin, and the gaps between words vary.

Worked example. At the default settings (Caveat, college ruling, letter size 100%, messiness 35) the letters are 7.14 × 1.15 = 8.2 mm tall as set type. Messiness 35 means each letter can turn up to ±0.9°, sit up to ±0.17 mm above or below the line, and be up to 1.4% bigger or smaller. A full line on A4 is 163.5 mm long and can drift up to ±0.34 mm over that length, while word gaps vary by up to ±9%. Push messiness to 100 and those become ±2.6°, ±0.49 mm, ±4% and ±1 mm: a hurried scrawl.

The variation is random but repeatable. The same text and settings always give the same page, so you can download a PNG now and the PDF later and they match. Typing more at the end does not reshuffle the letters before it. New variation picks a fresh set of random choices for the whole text.

Slant leans every letter the same way, which suits fonts drawn upright such as Kalam or Indie Flower. Fonts that already lean, like Homemade Apple, look odd pushed further, so leave slant at 0 for those. Pencil draws in grey with lighter strokes, and the “uneven light” option darkens one corner of the sheet like a phone photo taken under a lamp.

Lined paper in the US comes in three standard rulings: wide (also called legal) ruled, which younger pupils often use, college (medium) ruled, the usual choice for notebooks, and narrow ruled for small writing. The red margin line on US filler paper sits about 1¼ in (32 mm) from the left edge, and the writing here starts just inside it. Letter size follows the ruling, so wide-ruled pages get bigger writing, just as they would by hand.

Grid paper uses squares the size of the chosen line spacing. Narrow gives 6.35 mm squares, which is the common US quad ruling of 4 squares to the inch. Plain paper keeps the same invisible lines, so the writing stays level without any rules showing.

Line counts are for this page’s lined layout: the first rule is 25 mm from the top, with a blank band above it for a name or date, and writing stops 14 mm from the bottom. Blank lines in your text stay blank on the page, so leave one between paragraphs if you would when writing by hand. The status line under the preview shows how many lines the current settings fit.

To get pages in your own writing, make a font from it first, then load it under Fine-tune › Use your own handwriting font. Font makers such as Calligraphr work the same way: print a template with a box for each letter, fill every box with the pen you normally use, scan or photograph the sheet, upload it, and download a .ttf or .otf file.

• Write each letter at your natural size and speed. Careful, slow letters look less like you than quick ones.
• Keep the letters sitting on the template’s baseline, or they will bounce when put together into words.
• Fill in punctuation and numbers too; anything missing falls back to a standard font and the status line lists it.
• If the font maker lets you add two or three versions of common letters, do it. It breaks up the repetition far better than any random variation.
• Joined-up cursive is hard to capture as single letters, because each letter joins differently depending on its neighbours. Printed letters convert better.

Your font file is read by your browser and never uploaded. It is forgotten when you close the page, so load it again next time.

The PDF has one page per sheet, exactly A4 (210 × 297 mm) or US Letter (8.5 × 11 in), with the handwriting drawn at 300 pixels per inch. To keep the rules and margin where they belong, print it at Actual size or 100%. “Fit to page” shrinks it a few percent to fit the printer’s margins. A printer cannot print to the very edge, so the outer few millimetres of the ruled lines may be cut off; the writing itself sits well inside that.

Pick the page size that matches the paper in the printer. Printing an A4 PDF on Letter paper (or the reverse) scales it down or crops it, and the line spacing no longer matches real ruled paper.

A font only draws the characters its designer made. When your text has a character the chosen font lacks, the browser fills in from a standard font, which stands out in the middle of handwriting. This page checks every character against the chosen font and lists the missing ones under the preview.

For Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and other languages written in Devanagari, choose Kalam, from the Indian Type Foundry. Devanagari words are drawn whole rather than letter by letter, so the vowel signs and joined letters stay correctly shaped. For Russian, Ukrainian and other Cyrillic text, choose Caveat. Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew are not covered by these fonts.

The table follows the character sets Google Fonts serves for each font. All six are free to use, including commercially: five under the SIL Open Font License and Homemade Apple under the Apache License 2.0.