Can I use cursive or joined-up writing?

Not directly. Connected letters have no gap to separate on, so they trace as a single shape. Write the letters separately and tighten the spacing afterwards to get a connected feel.

How many letters do I need to write?

As many as you want in the font. There is no minimum, but a font that is useful for typing needs upper case, lower case, digits and basic punctuation.

Will the font look identical to my handwriting?

It will use your shapes, but a font repeats the same drawing of each letter every time, whereas real handwriting varies. The result reads as a stylised version of your hand rather than a forgery of it.

Turn handwriting into a font

Turning handwriting into a font is less about the software than about the sheet you write. A careful twenty minutes with a pen produces a font that feels like you; a hurried scribble produces something that looks like your handwriting having a bad day, permanently.

Write the sheet properly

Write on unlined white paper with a pen that puts down solid, opaque ink. Gel pens, fineliners and brush pens all photograph well. Ballpoint is workable but often too light. Pencil is the hardest to convert because the strokes are grey and textured rather than solid black.

Write each character separately with clear space around it. This is the single most important instruction on this page. Joined-up cursive cannot be split into letters reliably, because there is no gap to split on — the letters are genuinely one shape. If you want a connected look, write the letters separately and let the spacing do the work.

01Rule yourself a light guide in pencil, or write on a sheet placed over lined paper so the lines show through without being photographed.
02Write A to Z in capitals, one row at a time, leaving a finger's width between letters.
03Write a to z in lowercase, keeping the x-height consistent — this matters more than the shapes.
04Write 0 to 9.
05Write the punctuation you actually use: full stop, comma, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation mark, hyphen, colon.
06Write anything with an accent you need, and write the accent marks clearly separated from the letter beneath them.

The characters people forget

A font built from A–Z alone falls apart the first time you type an apostrophe. Before you photograph the sheet, check you have written the space-adjacent characters: apostrophe and quotation marks, the hyphen, and the full stop and comma. If you write in a language that uses accents, write the accented characters themselves rather than expecting the tool to compose them — a font can only contain the shapes you drew.

The same applies to inverted punctuation. If you need ¿ and ¡, write them. They are not rotations of ? and ! that software should be inventing on your behalf.

Photograph or scan it

A flatbed scanner at 300 dpi in greyscale gives the most consistent result, because the lighting is perfectly even by construction. A phone camera is fine if you give it flat light: put the sheet near a window on an overcast day, hold the phone parallel to the page, and check the preview for a bright patch or a shadow before you shoot.

Do not use flash. It produces a hotspot in the centre and darkens the corners, which is exactly the pattern that makes thresholding difficult.

Convert and correct

Drop the photograph in. The characters are separated, laid out in reading order and traced. If the tool is unsure about how a row split, it opens the review step rather than reporting a clean conversion — check any letter it flags.

Smoothing is measured from your image rather than fixed, so handwriting with genuine curves gets curve-friendly tracing and a squarer hand gets sharper corners. If your letters come back rounder than you wrote them, lower it manually.

Making it read like handwriting

Two adjustments do most of the work. Spacing controls the side bearings — real handwriting sits closer together than most traced fonts do by default, so nudge it down until a typed line looks like a written one. Baseline controls where the writing line falls, which is what stops descenders on g, j, p, q and y from sitting on the line instead of hanging below it.

Type a full sentence in the preview rather than judging from single letters. Handwriting is a rhythm, and rhythm is only visible in running text.

Questions

Can I use cursive or joined-up writing?: Not directly. Connected letters have no gap to separate on, so they trace as a single shape. Write the letters separately and tighten the spacing afterwards to get a connected feel.
How many letters do I need to write?: As many as you want in the font. There is no minimum, but a font that is useful for typing needs upper case, lower case, digits and basic punctuation.
Will the font look identical to my handwriting?: It will use your shapes, but a font repeats the same drawing of each letter every time, whereas real handwriting varies. The result reads as a stylised version of your hand rather than a forgery of it.