draw-your-font

Turn a photo of your handwriting into a real font (TTF/WOFF/WOFF2) - free, open source, no uploads, no credits.

Draw your alphabet on paper. Take a photo. Get your font.

A photo of a handwritten alphabet in a spiral notebook becoming an installable font

This is a real one-shot result: dim light, spiral binding, page shadow. One photo in, installable font out.

Use it as a Claude Code skill (the fun way)

npx skills add danilo-znamerovszkij/draw-your-font

Then in Claude Code, invoke the skill and hand it your photo:

/draw-your-font "here's a photo of my handwriting - make my font" (drag the photo into the terminal)

Claude finds your letters in the photo, labels them with vision, builds the
font, shows you a preview, and critiques its own work. Iterate by talking:

"make it rounder" / "a bit bolder"
"the g looks bad" - it shows you the crop and fixes or asks for a re-shoot
"give me woff2 + css for my website"
"how readable is it?" - a legibility score and the two worst letter pairs

No photo yet? Say "give me a font template" and you get a printable PDF grid:
write your alphabet with a dark pen, photograph the pages, and hand them back.
Messy freeform photos work too. Napkins, notebooks, spiral binding, bad
lighting: that's what the vision step is for.

Everything runs locally on your machine. Your handwriting never leaves it.

Use it as a CLI (no AI at all)

The skill is a thin layer over a deterministic npm CLI. It works on its own
when you can tell it what you wrote:

# freeform photo, you know the order you wrote in:
npx draw-your-font make photo.jpg --chars "ABCabc" --name "My Hand"
# → MyHand.ttf - double-click, install, done.

# best quality: print a template, fill it, photograph:
npx draw-your-font template -o template.pdf --charset minimal   # or: spanish
npx draw-your-font make page1.jpg page2.jpg --charset minimal --name "My Hand"

Pure npm, zero system dependencies: no FontForge, no ImageMagick, no potrace
binary. Works on macOS / Linux / Windows wherever Node ≥ 18 runs.

CLI reference

Command	What it does
`template`	printable A4 PDF grid (`--charset minimal\|spanish`)
`segment <photos…>`	find letters → crops + numbered contact sheet + `blobs.json`
`build`	labeled crops → font (`--labels` / `--chars` / `--charset`)
`make <photos…>`	segment + build in one shot
`preview`	render any text with the built font

Refinement flags: --smooth 0..2 (rounder curves), --weight=-2..2
(thinner/bolder), --formats ttf,woff,woff2,css (web-ready + @font-face
snippet). Run draw-your-font --help for everything.

How it works

photo ──► adaptive threshold ──► blob detection ──► label (Claude / you / template order)
      ──► potrace vectorize ──► shared em-square metrics ──► TTF/WOFF/WOFF2 + preview

The craft is in the metrics step: every character has a vertical band in a
shared 1000-unit em square (cap height, x-height, descender depth), so your
g hangs below the line and your o stays small. That's what makes it feel
like a font instead of a ransom note. Vectorization is potrace, the same
engine inside FontForge and Inkscape. AI never draws your letters; it only
finds, labels, and judges them.

FAQ

Who owns the font? You. 100%, commercial use included. It's your
handwriting.

Why is this free when Calligraphr charges $8/month? Their cost is
servers and a browser editor. Here your machine does the work and the agent
is the editor.

Kerning, ligatures, letter randomization? v2. The pipeline (fonttools
calt) is planned; the current output is a clean single-variant font.

License

MIT. Draw something.