Print the A4 template, write one character per box, photograph or scan it, and download your own installable font. No printer? Skip to the Draw tab and write the letters straight into the page. Everything — alignment, tracing and font packaging — happens in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Print at 100% scale — do not tick "fit to page", or the corner squares will move and alignment will drift. Write with a dark pen. Ignore the pink guides in the scan; they are invisible to the reader.
The red line is where the baseline landed. If a character sits far off it, exclude it here and redraw it on the Draw tab.
Installing: Windows — right-click the .ttf and choose Install.
macOS — double-click, then Install Font. Linux — drop it in ~/.local/share/fonts and run fc-cache -f.
How Handwriting Becomes a Font
A font is not a picture of letters, it is a set of mathematical outlines plus a table saying which outline belongs to which character code. Turning handwriting into one means solving four problems in order: work out where on the page each letter actually is, separate ink from paper, convert a blob of pixels into smooth curves, and pack those curves into the binary layout that Windows, macOS and Linux expect.
This tool does all four in your browser. The four black squares on the template let it compute a perspective transform, so a photo taken at an angle is straightened back into a perfect A4 page before anything else happens — that is why a phone snap works nearly as well as a flatbed scan. The guides are printed in pale red because pen ink is dark in the red colour channel while pale red is not, so the boxes and baselines simply vanish when the page is read.
Each cell is then thresholded, cleaned of scanner speckle, and its ink boundary is walked pixel by pixel. That staircase outline is low-pass filtered to remove the stair steps, simplified, and finally fitted with quadratic Bézier curves — the same curve type TrueType uses internally, which is why the result can be written straight into a real .ttf with no lossy conversion step.
Crucially, every letter is positioned against the printed baseline rather than being individually centred. That is what stops the finished font from looking like a ransom note: descenders drop below the line, x-heights line up, and capitals share a cap line, exactly as they did on your paper.
Getting a Good Result
Use a pen with a consistent dark line. A fineliner or gel pen around 0.5 mm is ideal. Pencil is too faint and thresholds badly; a thick marker closes up the counters in a, e and o.
Sit the letters on the solid line. The dashed lines are only hints for ascender, x-height and descender. The solid one is the baseline and it is the single most important thing on the page.
Fill the box. Small timid letters get scaled up along with their noise. Write at roughly the size the guides suggest.
Print at 100%. If your print dialogue shrinks the page to fit, the corner squares move relative to the grid and every letter lands slightly off its baseline.
Light it evenly. When photographing, avoid a hard shadow across the sheet. The tool corrects for gentle gradients but a sharp shadow edge will be read as ink.