Text to Handwriting

About Text to Handwriting

Type or paste your text, pick a handwriting style and a sheet of paper, and watch it appear written out by hand. Save the result as a PNG image or as a PDF with every page in it.

Everything is drawn in your browser. Your text is not uploaded and not stored anywhere.

Why it does not look like a font

Anyone can pick a handwriting font and type into it. It always looks wrong, and the reason is that a font draws the letter a exactly the same way every single time, on exactly the same line, at exactly the same size. No human hand does that.

So this does not simply set your text in a font. Every character is drawn on its own, with:

• A small shift left or right and up or down
• A slight rotation, a fraction of a degree each way
• A small change in size
• A small change in how dark the ink is, as pen pressure varies
• And each line drifting a little above or below the rule

The How untidy slider controls how much of all that you get. At zero the writing is even and tidy — a very neat hand. Around 35 it reads as ordinary handwriting. Up at 80 or more it is someone scribbling in a hurry.

The wobble is worked out from where the character sits, not from a dice roll, so it does not re-scramble the whole page every time you type another word.

Paper, ink and pens

• Ruled with a margin — school and notebook paper, blue rules and a red margin line
• Ruled, no margin — plain lined paper
• Squared — maths and engineering paper
• Blank white or blank cream — letters, notes, and anything that should not look like an exercise book
• Six ink colours: blue biro, black, dark blue ink, red, green and a pencil-ish grey-brown
• Seven hands, from a quick everyday scrawl to looping cursive and architect's capitals
• A4, US Letter or A5, drawn at 150 dpi so it prints properly
• Full page or small note — a note is trimmed to the writing, with no rules, no margin and no empty paper
• A see-through note, for dropping handwriting straight onto another picture

Turn on Make it look photographed and the page gets the uneven lighting and soft corner shading of a phone photo, instead of the perfectly flat white of something generated on a computer.

A full page, or a small note

Most handwriting tools only give you a sheet of A4 with your words at the top and a great expanse of empty paper underneath. That is right for a letter and wrong for everything else.

So the Paper list has two halves. The first is ordinary paper at whatever page size you pick — ruled, squared or blank — for letters, homework and anything you are going to print.

The second is a small note. The paper is cut down to the writing itself: the width shrinks to the longest line, the height stops after the last one, and there are no rules and no margin line at all. The only thing left to choose is what colour it sits on:

• Sticky yellow, white, cream, pale blue or pale pink
• See-through, which gives a PNG with nothing behind the ink

A note is what you want for a caption on a slide, a quote in a blog post, a sticky-note graphic, or anything you are going to place on top of another picture — because there is no empty margin to crop off afterwards. Type two words and you get a small card, not a mostly-blank page.

The see-through one is the most useful of the lot: drop it straight onto a photo, a poster or a slide and only the handwriting shows. (A PDF cannot hold transparency, so a see-through note is put on white in the PDF — take the PNG if you need it clear.)

The page size still applies to a note: it sets the widest the note is allowed to get before the writing wraps.

What people use it for

• Personal letters and thank-you notes that should not look typed
• Invitations, place cards and journal pages
• Handwriting-style images for a blog post, a video or a slide
• Practice sheets to copy from when learning a script
• Mock-ups where a designer needs a page of handwriting that is not real

Please be sensible about schoolwork

This comes up, so it is worth saying plainly: this makes a picture of handwriting. It is not your handwriting, and it is not a way to produce work that was meant to be written by hand.

If your school, college or university requires handwritten work, handing in something generated here is misrepresenting how the work was produced, and most institutions treat that as a form of academic misconduct. Use it for letters, notes, design work and practice sheets — not to get around a rule.

Features

• Seven handwriting styles and six ink colours
• Eleven papers — ruled, squared and blank pages, plus six colours of trimmed note
• How untidy, slant, writing size and gap between lines all adjustable
• Paragraph indents kept, and your own line breaks respected
• Automatic page splitting — long text simply becomes more pages
• Scanned-page look for when a clean render looks too perfect
• Download the whole thing as a PDF, or any single page as a PNG
• Drawn at 150 dpi, so a printed page looks like writing rather than pixels
• 100% in your browser — nothing uploaded, nothing stored

Related tools

• Signature Maker — draw or type a signature as a transparent PNG
• Online Notepad — write the text first, then bring it here
• Text to Speech — the same words read out loud instead
• Image to PDF — put saved pages together into one file
• Add Text & Image to PDF — place handwriting onto an existing PDF

Good to know

• The handwriting styles are webfonts, so the first render waits a moment for one to arrive. After that they are cached and it is instant.
• Very long text simply makes more pages. Use the picker next to the PNG button to save a particular page; the PDF always has all of them. A small note is always one piece, however long it grows.
• If the writing runs off the bottom of the last page, make the writing smaller or reduce the gap between lines.

How to use it

• Type or paste your text in the big box
• Pick a handwriting style, then a paper — a full page for a letter, or a *small note* if you want it trimmed to the writing with no lines
• Choose an ink colour — blue biro looks the most like a real note
• Set the writing size and the gap between lines so it sits nicely on the rules
• Move the How untidy slider until it stops looking like a font — around 35 is a good start
• Turn on Make it look photographed if you want it to look like a phone photo of a page
• Press Download PDF for everything, or pick a page and Download this page as PNG