Free and cloud-free: Draw Your Font turns a photo of your handwriting into a real computer font

Creating your own handwriting font usually means buying complex vector software like Glyphs or paying for cloud services. Independent developer Danylo Znamerovskyi has released an open, free alternative: Draw Your Font, a utility that generates ready-to-install files straight from a photo of a sheet of paper covered in writing. For users, it’s a simple way to bring their handwriting into the digital world without worrying about subscriptions or privacy.

The basic version of the tool is available right on the Draw Your Font website. All you have to do is write out the alphabet on a sheet of paper, photograph it, upload the image to the service and specify the sequence of characters. The project’s main advantage is that it runs entirely locally. Photos are not sent to remote servers: all processing, vectorization and compilation happen right in the user’s browser tab.

Terminal, web fonts and an AI assistant

For more advanced tasks, there’s a command-line interface (CLI) built on Node.js. Unlike the web version, which only outputs the classic TTF format for Windows and macOS, the CLI tool can export fonts in the optimized WOFF and WOFF2 formats for embedding on websites.

The process can be automated further with neural networks. The developer integrated support for the Claude Code tool: the AI can find the letters in the photo on its own, recognize them, build a preview and point out exactly which characters came out poorly and need fixing. That said, there’s no AI requirement — if you know the order of the characters in the image, the algorithm will work flawlessly from a regular terminal command.

Vectorization and current limitations

Under the hood, the utility doesn’t just chop the photo into pieces. The algorithm isolates each character, converts its outlines into a vector format and carefully aligns the glyphs to the baseline, accounting for the height of lowercase and uppercase letters. The result is a full-fledged system font that scales correctly in text editors.

The project’s source code is published on GitHub under the free MIT license. That means the copyright to the generated font stays with the user, including the right to sell it commercially.

At the same time, the tool has technical limitations that keep it from replacing professional typography for now. Draw Your Font generates only one static variant for each letter and doesn’t support kerning (individual spacing between specific pairs of characters) or ligatures. In reality, people write the same letter differently, but here the text will look slightly “machine-made” because every character is absolutely identical. The utility is great for making indie games, personal notes, digital diaries or comics, but its feature set isn’t enough for professional branding yet.