Text to Handwriting

About the Text to Handwriting

Type or paste your text and it appears straight away written by hand on a page of ruled notebook paper. Choose one of three handwriting styles — everyday print, joined-up cursive or formal calligraphy — then the pen weight, the ink colour (blue, black, dark blue, red, green or any colour), the paper (ruled with a red margin, ruled, squared, yellow legal pad or plain), A4, US Letter or A5, and the line spacing.

Natural variation makes it look written rather than typed: every word sits a little higher or lower, tilts and changes size slightly, the start of each line moves a bit, and lines drift gently; with the everyday style each letter wobbles on its own too, so repeated letters never look stamped. New handwriting gives the same text a fresh set of wobbles. Long texts flow onto as many pages as they need, and you can save them all as one PDF or as PNG images. Everything is drawn in your browser — your text is never uploaded.

Common uses

• Notes, flash cards and worksheets that look handwritten, for printing or sharing.
• Handwritten-style letters, cards, recipes and journal pages.
• Mock-ups, props and illustrations that need a handwritten page.
• Practising a neat handwriting style by tracing the printed page.

How the handwriting is made

The text is written with real handwriting fonts and laid out line by line on the paper you choose: words wrap at the right margin, each new line of your text starts on the next ruled line, and a word longer than a whole line is split between letters. At 100% Natural variation each word moves up or down by up to about half a millimetre, tilts by up to 1.6° and changes size by up to 5%, its ink is a little lighter or darker, gaps between words vary and each line drifts by up to about a millimetre; with the everyday style each letter also wobbles on its own. Lower settings scale all of this down, and at 0% the writing is perfectly regular.

The page is drawn in millimetres, so the PDF and the PNG show exactly what the preview shows, at 150 or 300 dots per inch. In the PDF each page is an image of the full paper size, ready to print at 100%.

Handwriting styles and the characters they have

• Everyday handwriting — Caveat by Impallari Type: Latin letters with accents and Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian …).
• Joined-up cursive — Dancing Script by Impallari Type: Latin letters with accents and Vietnamese.
• Formal calligraphy — Great Vibes by Robert Leuschke: Latin letters with accents, Cyrillic and Vietnamese, one pen weight.

All three fonts are free under the SIL Open Font License and are part of this page, so nothing is downloaded from elsewhere. If your text has characters a style lacks — for example Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, emoji or symbols such as √ and → — the tool lists them and draws them in a standard font from your device instead, a whole word at a time, so that letters which join (Arabic, Hindi conjuncts) stay joined. A paragraph that starts in Arabic, Hebrew or Urdu is written from the right margin.

Limitations

• It uses handwriting fonts, not your own handwriting, and close inspection shows the same letter shapes repeating.
• There are three handwriting styles; scripts other than Latin, Cyrillic and Vietnamese (such as Devanagari, Arabic or Chinese) have no handwriting font here, so they look typed rather than handwritten.
• Right-to-left paragraphs are put in order word by word: a short English phrase or a number inside Arabic or Hebrew text comes out right, but a long mix of both directions on one line can need checking.
• There is no bold, italics, underlining or pictures.
• Up to 40,000 characters and 50 pages at a time.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.