FontWriter
The FontWriter app icon

Turn your handwriting into a real font.

Print a template, write on it, and scan it back. FontWriter reads every letter and builds an OTF or TTF font you can install and type with.

Download for Mac

macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon

The headings on this page are set in Architect, a handwriting font made with FontWriter.

The Review step, showing a grid of handwritten letters from A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9, each drawn on its guide lines

Three ways to start

  • Write on paper. Print a template, fill it in with your favourite pen, and scan or photograph it.
  • Draw in the app. Draw each letter with a mouse, trackpad or pen tablet. Pressing lighter draws a thinner line.
  • Fix up a font. Open an existing TTF or OTF, then align and reshape its letters.
The start screen, with Write on paper, Draw in the app and Fix up a font, and a recent project card

Every letter keeps its true height

Most handwriting font tools crop each letter to its own box. That lifts the tail of a g up onto the baseline and makes small letters as tall as capitals. FontWriter measures every letter from the printed baseline of its own box and uses one scale for all of them, so tails hang, small letters stay small, and your writing looks like your writing.

Cropped to each letter: the g floats up so its tail sits on the baseline
Cropped to each letter. The g jumps up to sit on the line.
FontWriter: the g's tail hangs below the baseline, just as it was written
FontWriter. The tail hangs below the baseline, the way you wrote it.

The printed guide lines sit exactly at the font's ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline and descender.

How it works

  1. 1

    Pick your characters

    Start from presets like A to Z, digits, punctuation, accented letters and currency symbols, or type any characters you want. FontWriter lays them out on a printable template with a box for each one.

    The guide lines print in a light cyan that disappears when the page is scanned, and a QR code on every page tells the app exactly which letters are on it.

    Step 1, Characters: character presets on the left and a zoomable preview of the printable template with a QR code and cyan guide lines
  2. 2

    Scan it back, or draw

    Drop in scans or phone photos, in any order. The corner squares straighten a photo taken at an angle, and PDFs from office scanners work too.

    Prefer to skip the paper? Draw each letter right in the app on the same guide lines, with pressure from a pen tablet.

    Step 2, Import: four scanned template pages, each recognised with its page number and how many letters it holds
    Step 2, Draw: a capital A drawn over a faint guide letter on the writing lines, with pen width, smoothing and pen pressure settings
  3. 3

    Review every letter

    See the whole font at once, and try it out in the preview line. Tune the stroke weight and ink threshold for every letter together, set the spacing, and use Auto-align and Even heights to tidy things up in one click.

    Step 3, Review: the grid of letters with the stroke weight, ink threshold, spacing, auto-align and even heights controls above it
  4. 4

    Export and install

    Preview the finished font with any text you like, then export it as a .ttf or .otf file. Open it in Font Book to install it, and type with your handwriting anywhere on your Mac.

    Step 4, Export: buttons to export .ttf or .otf beside a live preview of the finished font, reading The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

A letter editor for the details

Open any letter in its own window and fix it by hand. Drag its box to move or stretch it, with handles that snap to the guide lines.

The letter editor window showing a g inside a box with eight drag handles, its tail hanging below the baseline
The Strokes tab, with the letter's pen strokes found automatically and a box to move or rotate one of them
Strokes. FontWriter finds the pen strokes in each letter. Move, resize or rotate one stroke, or just part of it.
The Ink tab, zoomed in on a letter with a brush for painting and erasing ink
Ink. Paint over a gap or erase a stray mark, zoomed in as far as you need.
  • Position and Shape. Shift, resize, slant and rotate a letter, or stretch its top to a guide line.
  • Sample. Wrote a letter more than once? Pick the copy you like best.
  • Live context. The letter is shown next to its neighbours in the font you're building, as you edit it.

The details

Private by design

Everything happens on your Mac. Your scans and letters never leave it, and the app works offline.

Pages in any order

The QR code on each page carries its letters, so you can scan pages whenever and however you like.

Projects you can come back to

Save your work as a project file, reopen it later, and pick up exactly where you stopped.

Download for Mac

macOS 13 or later · Apple silicon