HandFont

Live

Your handwriting, as a real font. Draw each letter on a guided sheet or photograph a filled-in template, and HandFont traces it into clean outlines and builds a .ttf you can install on your computer or phone. It all happens in your browser; your handwriting never leaves your device.

Screenshots

A paper practice sheet with ruled guides for ascender, capitals, x-height, baseline and descender, and a hand-drawn lowercase a in blue-black ink

The practice sheet

A letter on paper typed in the finished handwriting font, with the font name as a letterhead and a download button

Your font, as a letter

The HandFont home screen with its headline typed in a font the app made of itself, and Draw it and Photograph it as two choices

Draw it or photograph it

What It Does

→Draw mode: a practice sheet with ruled guides walks you through 81 characters, letters, figures and everyday punctuation, with a finger, a stylus or a mouse; ink width follows pressure or speed
→Photo mode: print a two-page template, write on it, photograph it; the app finds the page corners, straightens the photo, and cuts every letter out, with a loupe to fix any corner by hand
→A live proof line shows your font as you draw it; an overview grid shows every finished letter in miniature and lets you jump to any of them
→The Font tab sets your font in a letter on paper, with your name as the letterhead, and tunes spacing, weight and the width of a space while you watch
→Download a real .ttf, with install tips for Windows, Mac and iPhone, or a zip of every glyph as SVG if you want to tweak them in a font editor
→Projects save themselves in your browser, so a half-finished alphabet survives a reload; nothing is ever uploaded

What I Built

→A bitmap-to-outline tracer written from scratch: contour following with holes, Douglas–Peucker simplification, Schneider curve fitting with corner detection, and TrueType winding, tested on synthetic shapes
→A perspective solve for photo mode (a small linear system for the homography), fiducial detection in the template corners, and adaptive thresholding that copes with shadows and faint pens
→My own TrueType glyf writer, because the usual library could only write CFF outlines; the result parses and renders in Chrome, Windows and macOS
→Metrics derived from the guides, so letters line up on one baseline when typed, and advance widths from the ink plus a spacing you set
→Paper, ink and a nib: a design built around a practice sheet, with self-hosted type and a drawn nib mark
→A static, installable web app (React, TypeScript, Vite) with a service worker, fully offline; no GPL tracing code, no accounts, no analytics

Open HandFont Start a Project