FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font

rendx 443 points 151 comments March 09, 2026
arcade.pirillo.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

jruohonen

The idea is cool, but, well: "No account, no server, 100% private — everything happens in your browser."

vaylian

The instructions say that rows 2 and 3 in the template can be either lower or upper case. How does the website determine the case in those rows? Does it simply check if row 1 looks different from the other rows?

Thomashuet

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support cursive, which is how I and most people I know write.

zimpenfish

I've used iFontMaker for this on the iPad - quite amusing to be able to select my own monospaced font for terminals (even if it is just "old man traced over Courier Prime badly".) Will definitely give this a go with various pens to see how that affects the outcome.

nacozarina

new signature-forging tool just dropped, suite !

ghrl

There used to be multiple tools like this from different websites, but they were all bought by Calligraphr to redirect to them instead, giving them an effective monopoly and letting them charge subscription fees for generating fonts over the limits of the free version. I used to create two fonts and merge them with FontForge to get a complete usable font. Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.

mittermayr

Amazing way to show-case a tool (all in-browser, can be done so simply), super disappointed in the result. I took care writing all the letters, but when I looked at the generated font, even some of the corner markers ended up as letters!? Not sure if this was meant to work with cursive handwriting?

psychoslave

Not sure it would work in my case. I do love to take the very different freedom it brings. For example the mid bars of a t is often taken as an opportunity to go through above the whole word. But I wouldn't do it every single time, as it would feel too much overload. I also don't write the same way on a post it ready to throw than in my little personal aphorism book, where I try to craft something where the form connects with the intended meaning.

world2vec

Turning my handwriting into a font is akin to encrypt the text :-D

feverzsj

That'll be the ugliest font.

ixvo

This works mostly for the US, where people don't write in cursive.

himata4113

Text encryption, I like it!

micw

Can I turn a real font into my handwriting?

catoc

A wise doctor once typed…

easton

Chris Pirillo. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. a long time .

xmattx

Tried it, it failed at the first hurdle, which is scanning the glyphs correctly. Seems to be an offset somewhere as they get shifted vertically.

alsodumb

My hand writing is so bad I don't know if a really want a font out of it lol (love the project though!)

karmasimida

Well I really don't like my handwriting, would rather avoid it

axegon_

Awesome! For anyone that think doctors' handwriting is unintelligible, wait till I give that thing a spin

scotty79

A sign of how irrelevant handwriting became is that there are no popular AI models that aim at cloning it, even though it should be fairly easy.

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