HandWritten Help Documentation

A complete guide to HandWritten, from your text to a saved page.

Last Updated: November 11, 2026

1. Getting Started

HandWritten has five parts in the bar at the top: Text, Writing, Paper, Pages and Signature. On a wide screen the pages sit beside the settings and update as you type, so the Pages tab is not shown; on a phone or a narrow window, Pages shows them on their own. A sample text is already in the box when you first come, so you can try the styles straight away.

The pages are typed text drawn in a handwriting style. They suit notes, cards, letters to friends, journal and planner pages, art projects and mock-ups. Where a teacher, an exam, an employer or an office asks for your own handwriting or signature, write it by hand.

2. Typing and Formatting

Type in the Text box or paste from anywhere. The buttons above the box add the marks for you, around the words you selected or on the lines you are on:

• # Title at the start of a line: a larger title, centred (unless you untick Centre titles) and underlined twice.
• ## Heading: a heading, underlined once.
• __words__ underlined by hand, ==words== highlighted, ~~words~~ crossed out and **words** pressed harder.
• - item or 1. item (also a. or i.): a list with a hanging indent.
• -> on its own between words: a hand-drawn arrow.
• --- on a line of its own: start a new page.

Under Layout you can indent the first line of each paragraph. The line under the box counts the words, characters and pages.

3. Date, Page Numbers and the Name Line

The Date box takes any text up to 40 characters; Today fills in today's date. On the notebook paper the date and the page number are written in the Date and Page No. box at the top of each page; on the other papers the date sits at the right of the first line and the page number above it. Type the first page number, or leave it empty for none. The name line (up to 120 characters, such as your name and the subject) is written on the first line of the first page, or of every page when you tick the box; words that do not fit the line are left out.

4. Sample Texts

The Samples list has six texts: revision notes on photosynthesis, a thank-you note, a diary entry, a recipe card for masala chai, a Hindi text about Diwali and a Gujarati text about a school. Loading one replaces your text; the message that appears has an Undo button that brings your text back. The trash button clears the text, also with an Undo.

5. Handwriting Styles

Under Writing, the chips pick a group and the tiles show each style with words from your own text. English has four groups: Neat (13 styles), Joined (14 cursive styles), Casual (13) and Kids (5, two of them school handwriting models). The line above the chips says which style each language on your page uses.

Joined styles keep each word in one piece, so the joins between letters stay intact; for them the letter spacing slider is greyed out. Size, slant, word spacing and How carefully it is written work for every style.

6. Indian Languages

Hindi and Marathi (Devanagari) have five styles, Gujarati two, Bengali two and Tamil one. Their letters are shaped and joined as whole words, as they are written, and their size is matched to the English writing so mixed lines look even. A page can mix English with any of them; each language uses the style chosen in its own group. Words in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew are drawn whole so their letters join, but the words of a line still run from left to right.

7. Your Own Handwriting

If you have a font made from your own handwriting, choose the Your font chip and load its .ttf, .otf, .woff or .woff2 file (up to 15 MB). Tick "The letters join up" if it is cursive, so each word stays in one piece. The font is kept in this browser's own database and comes back next time; Remove deletes it. It is used for English; Indian languages keep their own styles.

8. Pen, Tip, Ink and Size

Five pens: Ballpoint (a fine grain and small skips where the ink thins), Gel pen (smooth and even), Fountain pen (ink that spreads a little), Pencil (grainy and grey; choosing it picks the pencil grey) and Felt tip (broad and soft). The tip sets the thickness: fine, medium or bold. Seven inks are ready, and the rainbow swatch picks any colour.

The sliders set the size (70 to 140%), the slant (15 degrees left to 20 degrees right), the letter spacing, the word spacing and How carefully it is written, from Very neat to Scrawled.

9. Real-Life Touches

• Crossed-out mistakes, a few or more: some longer words are first started wrongly, misspelled or written with a correction above, then struck through once or twice or scribbled out.
• Gets a little messier down the page: the writing loosens and slants a little more towards the bottom.
• Ink blots and a smudge, and doodles in the margin (stars, hearts, flowers, a smiley and more).
• Highlighter colour for the ==highlighted== words: yellow, green, pink, orange or blue.

10. Paper

Nine papers: Notebook (ruled with a margin and the Date and Page No. box), Ruled with a margin, Ruled, College ruled (7.1 mm lines and a heading line), Four-line copybook, Squared (5 mm squares), Dotted, Plain and a yellow Legal pad with a double margin. Sizes: A4, Letter, A5 and a notebook size of 18 by 24 cm. Colours: white, cream, aged, recycled and yellow.

Line spacing sets the distance between lines, and the letter size follows it. On squared and dotted paper it snaps to whole 5 mm squares; on four-line paper it sets the distance between the sets. The left and right margins set where the writing starts and ends.

11. Edges, Wear and the Look of the File

The edge can be clean, spiral bound, torn out of a spiral notebook, or punched with two holes (80 mm apart, as ISO 838 sets out) or three on Letter. Wear adds folds in four and a tea or coffee ring. The look of the file is Clean file, Scanned (very slightly tilted, with a scanner's contrast and shadow) or Phone photo (the sheet on a wooden desk, a grey table or a dark cloth, turned a little and seen at an angle). The tiles show your current page in each look.

12. Pages, Zoom and Rewrite

The arrows beside "Page 1 of 3" turn the pages, and the thumbnails under the page jump to any page. The minus and plus buttons zoom from half size to three times, and Fit fits the page to the space. While you type, a quick draft appears first and sharpens when you pause. Rewrite draws the same text again with new natural variations.

13. Saving, Printing and Sharing

PDF saves every page in one file; each page is the drawn page at its paper size (the photo look is a little larger, as it includes the desk). The menu next to it saves the page you see as PNG or JPG, saves all pages as JPG pictures in a ZIP, copies the page you see as a picture, prints, or shares the PDF on devices that can share files. Download quality under Paper is Standard (150 dots per inch) or Print (300 dots per inch: an A4 page is 2,480 by 3,508 pixels). The files carry no author, program or other hidden details, and are named from the first line of your text.

14. The Signature Maker

Type it: your name (up to 40 characters) in one of twelve script styles, with no flourish, an underline, a swoosh or two lines, a slant from 10 degrees left to 25 degrees right, and an ink. Draw it: sign in the box with a mouse, finger or stylus; faster strokes come out thinner. Undo removes the last stroke and Clear removes them all, with an Undo.

The preview shows it on paper or on a clear background. Download PNG saves it with a clear background, Copy copies it as a picture, and Add to the end of my pages writes it at the right under the last line of your last page. It is a picture of your name: whether such a picture is accepted depends on who asks for it, so for official papers sign by hand or use the signing method they name.

15. Limits

• Text: up to 100,000 characters, filling at most 100 pages; anything after the hundredth page is left out with a note.
• Date: 40 characters; name line: 120 characters; typed signature: 40 characters.
• Drawn signature: up to 80 strokes and 8,000 points in all, 2,000 in one stroke (older strokes give way to new ones), so it stays small in the browser's storage.
• Your own font: one file of up to 15 MB.

16. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every button, box, tile and swatch can be reached with Tab and pressed with Enter or Space. While you use the tool (when it has focus, or nothing has focus and the tool is on screen), the left and right arrows turn the pages, + and - zoom, 0 fits the page, R rewrites and Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on a Mac) downloads the PDF. These keys do nothing while you type in a box or a window is open. The page count and messages are announced to screen readers.

17. Privacy and Your Data

Everything is drawn in this browser on your device: your text, signature and font are never uploaded. Your settings, text and signature are kept in this browser's storage under text-to-handwriting-settings once you change something, and a loaded font in the browser's database named text-to-handwriting; nothing is written on a first visit. Settings saved by the earlier HandWritten app on this site are moved over once. The handwriting fonts are free fonts under the SIL Open Font License and the Apache License, stored with the tool (licences). The page's ads and analytics work as described in the privacy policy.

18. How It Was Checked

Before this page was published, the engine behind the tool was checked: 574,038 cases in 13 groups. The marks for titles, underlines and the rest were compared with a separate reading of the same rules; the page layout was checked for words that leave the line, lose their order or are cut inside a letter; very long and broken text (100,000 characters in one word, emoji, Indian letter clusters, right-to-left words, thousands of marks) was laid out against a time limit; the lines of every paper were compared with the rules for each paper; PDFs were read back by a separate PDF reader, ZIP files by a separate ZIP reader and PNGs by a picture library; saved settings made to break the tool were checked value by value; and every font file's licence was compared with the licence list. Then the page was tried at four screen widths in both themes, with every part, every way of saving and very long text.

19. Troubleshooting and Support

• The page says the rest of the text is left out. The text fills more than 100 pages; split it into parts and save each.
• Letter spacing is greyed out. The chosen style is joined; pick a neat or casual style.
• My font does not load. Choose a .ttf, .otf, .woff or .woff2 font file of up to 15 MB.
• Copy this page does nothing. This browser cannot copy pictures; download a PNG instead.
• My settings did not come back. They are kept per browser and device; a private window or cleared browser data starts afresh.
• The printed page has margins or is cut. Choose the same paper size in the print window and turn off its margins or "fit to page".

For questions the FAQ does not answer, use the contact form.