Turning typed text into a handwritten page
How typed text becomes a handwritten-looking A4 page, how to pick the hand, paper and spacing, what makes it look written and not printed, and where a generated page should not be used.
Last reviewed · 1,550 words
In short
- Each page is A4 at 150 dots per inch, 1,240 × 1,754 pixels. A page holds 37 lines at 7 mm ruling, 32 at 8 mm and 29 at 9 mm.
- Choose Kalam for Hindi or Marathi. It is the one handwriting here with Devanagari letters; the other seven write English only.
- The Unevenness slider is what makes it read as handwriting. Every word shifts up to 5% of a line up or down and leans up to about 1.7 degrees, and no two pages wobble alike.
- Print the PDF at 100%, and use Plain paper when you will print onto a sheet that is already ruled.
- Your text never leaves your browser. Where a rule asks for work in your own hand, a generated page does not meet it.
You have text on a screen and want it to look as though someone wrote it out: revision notes that feel like your own notebook, a card, a classroom poster, a sample page to practise from. A handwriting font on its own does not manage that. Every "a" is the same "a" and every line is ruler-straight, and the eye notices at once. This is how a page is put together so that it does not look typed, and how to set it up.
How a page is made
The page is drawn on a canvas inside your browser, in four steps:
- The paper. A white or cream sheet, with ruled lines, a margin line or squares if you ask for them.
- The line breaks. Your text is measured in the handwriting you chose, at the size you chose, and broken into lines that fit between the margins. A word too long for a whole line is split across lines, and in Hindi the split falls between syllables, never inside one.
- The pages. Lines are counted off into pages. A blank line in your text is a blank line on the paper, and spaces at the start of a line indent it.
- The writing. Each word is drawn on its ruled line with a small amount of disorder, described further down.
The page is A4. At 150 dots per inch, 210 × 297 mm comes to 1,240 × 1,754 pixels, which is sharp on a phone and prints cleanly without making a ten-page PDF enormous. In testing, a three-page PDF came to about 1.7 MB.
Choosing the handwriting
There are eight hands. They are handwriting-style fonts, published as open fonts, and each has a character:
| Handwriting | Looks like | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Kalam | A neat pen, slightly slanted | Notes, and anything in Hindi or Marathi |
| Patrick Hand | Clear, upright print | Posters, labels, young readers |
| Indie Flower | Round and loose | Cards, friendly notes |
| Caveat | Quick and slanted | Jottings, margins, short notes |
| Shadows Into Light | Tall and thin | Headings, lists |
| Cedarville | Joined-up cursive | Letters, formal-looking pages |
| Homemade Apple | Loopy cursive | Signatures of style, invitations |
| Reenie Beanie | A hurried scrawl | Sticky notes, rough work |
Script fonts are not all the same size at the same setting: a loopy cursive has long tails and a small body, so it would look half the size of a print hand beside it. The tool evens that out, so switching hands does not force you to redo the size. Fine adjustment is the Size of the writing slider, from 70% to 130%.
Seven of the eight write English letters only. Kalam, made by Indian Type Foundry, has Devanagari as well, so it is the one to use for Hindi, Marathi or a page that mixes them with English. If you type Hindi in another hand, the Hindi words fall back to an ordinary printed font; the page warns you when that is happening.
The fonts are free to use. Seven are under the SIL Open Font License and Homemade Apple is under the Apache License 2.0; both allow the fonts to be used in pages and pictures like these without payment. Only the hand you pick is downloaded.
Paper and line spacing
Four papers are offered:
- Ruled, with a margin line. The red line down the left, as on a notebook page. The writing starts to its right, which shortens each line a little.
- Ruled. Lines only, with the writing starting nearer the edge.
- Plain. No lines at all. Use this when you will print onto paper that is already ruled, or want a clean sheet.
- Squared. A grid at the same spacing as the lines.
Line spacing is the distance between ruled lines. It sets how much fits on a page:
| Ruling | Lines on a page |
|---|---|
| Narrow, 7 mm | 37 |
| Wide, 8 mm | 32 |
| Extra wide, 9 mm | 29 |
The size of the writing follows the spacing, so a narrower ruling gives smaller writing as well as more lines. Pick the spacing first, then nudge the size.
Ink comes in blue, blue-black, black, red and green. Blue and blue-black read most like a pen on paper; black looks more like a print-out.
Making it look written, not printed
A person writing does four things a printer never does, and the tool imitates each a little:
- Words drift off the line. Each word sits slightly above or below the ruled line, by up to 5% of the line spacing. At 8 mm ruling that is less than half a millimetre: enough to see, not enough to look careless.
- Words lean. Each is tilted by up to about 1.7 degrees one way or the other.
- Gaps vary. The space between words is anywhere from about 70% to 130% of normal.
- The pen presses unevenly. Some words are drawn up to 16% lighter than others.
On top of that, each whole line climbs or sinks very slightly as it crosses the page, as handwriting on a ruled sheet does.
The Unevenness slider scales all of this together. At 0% every word sits dead on the line at full ink, which looks like a font and nothing more. Around 50 to 70% reads as a careful writer. At 100% it is a hurried one.
Two things keep it believable. First, the disorder is different on every page, so page two does not repeat page one's wobbles. Second, it is fixed once drawn: changing the ink colour does not reshuffle the page, and the page you preview is the page you download. When you want a different arrangement, press Write it again. The words stay and the wobbles are redrawn.
What it does not do is vary the letter shapes. Every "a" in one hand is still the same drawing. On a page of text that is rarely noticed, because position, lean and ink change from word to word, but a line that repeats one short word many times will show it.
Hindi and mixed text
Hindi needs more care than English because letters join: a vowel sign attaches to its consonant, and conjuncts merge two consonants into one shape. The browser's own text engine does that joining when the page is drawn, so words come out properly formed in Kalam.
Line breaks respect it too. A long word that has to be split is cut between whole syllables. Splitting inside one would leave a vowel sign stranded at the start of a line, drawn on a dotted circle.
Numbers, the rupee sign and English words mixed into a Hindi sentence are written in the same hand, so the page stays consistent.
Printing and sharing
There are three downloads:
- PDF. Every page, in order, one A4 sheet each, with the picture filling the sheet edge to edge. This is the one to print.
- PNG of the page on screen. A single picture, for sending or pasting into a document.
- ZIP of all pages. One JPG per page, numbered so they sort in order.
For printing, set the scale to 100% or "actual size". "Fit to page" shrinks the sheet slightly and the ruling will no longer be 8 mm. If you print on blank paper, the ruled lines print too, which is usually what you want. If you print onto a notebook page, choose Plain paper, and expect to adjust: a printer rarely lines up with pre-ruled lines on the first try.
Most home printers cannot print right to the edge, so the outer few millimetres are cut off. The writing is kept well inside the margins for that reason; only the ruled lines reach the edge.
Where it fits and where it does not
It suits anything where the look of handwriting is the point: study notes in a style you find easier to read, cards and labels, classroom displays, worksheets, mock-ups for a design, a clean copy of your own rough notes.
It does not suit work that has to be in your own hand. If a teacher, college, office or court asks for something handwritten, the reason is nearly always to know that you wrote it. A generated page is not your handwriting, however convincing, and handing it in as yours breaks that rule. The same goes for anything signed: a font is not a signature.
When you are unsure, ask the person who set the rule whether a typed copy is acceptable. Often it is, and then you do not need a disguise at all.
Limits
- Up to 20,000 characters of text, and up to 40 pages. Longer text is cut off at the fortieth page, and the page says how many lines were left out. Do a long piece in two parts.
- One hand, one ink and one paper for the whole document.
- No pictures, tables or underlining. Headings are just lines of text; leave a blank line under one to set it apart.
- A phone with little memory can struggle to build a PDF of many pages. If it fails, download the pages as pictures, or do fewer at a time.
Your text stays on your device throughout. The pages and the PDF are made in the browser, and the only thing fetched from this site is the font for the hand you chose.