Posted on by coutinho

Create A Font From Your Own Handwriting and Use It To Send Emails

By Karl L. Gechlik, MakeUseOf – June 25, 2010 at 11:30AM

create a fontThere is a new website called PilotHandwriting that allows you to create a font out of your own handwriting and send emails (or letters as they call them) with it.

I will show you how it works and how to capture the text for use in your own images using a little bit of a workaround. We have to use that workaround because as of now, PilotHandwriting does not allow you to download your font. If you are looking to be able to download the font for use in your word processing application then check out 2 Free Tools To Make Your Own Text Font.


Upon arriving at their website, you will be greeted by a little flash animation which surprisingly is not over the top and compliments the site.

create a font

You will then be shown a YouTube video about how it works. When it is complete, you will see a printable chart for you to fill in. That chart is shown below:

create a font

Go ahead and hit the Print button, print out the chart and then hit the right arrow on the screen to continue on to the next step. You will then fill in each letter or number in their respective spaces on the chart. Then when you are finished, you will have a few options to get the template back to the website. You can use a webcam, a scanner or a digital camera (cell phones work fine).

how to create a font

Hit the button for the option you want to use and get ready to upload. If you are using the scanner or camera options, you will need to upload your image in JPG form. I chose to snap the picture with my camera phone and upload that JPG.

Here is what my template looked like when I finished it:

how to create a font

Note that where I was not centered or wrote over the black lines, those letters were not recognized. So like they taught you in pre-school – stay in the lines, kiddies! Then get ready to upload your image:

how to create a font

Follow the on screen instructions for your particular method of upload and continue on. The web application will suck in your template and you will see each letter flash across the screen as it is processed like this:

make your own font

When it is complete, you will see something that looks like this:

make your own font

Hmm looks like some of my letters were not recognized. The best thing to do is rewrite the template and re-upload. But they do give you options to fix them onscreen. The problematic letters are marked with pictures of a pencil.

Then when you are complete, they will hit you up to log in. If you do not have an account, you can create one here:

make your own font

When you are finished you will be taken to a text editor where you can compose your message like this:

Type away and when you are finished, use a screen capture application to copy the text as an image and you will be able to paste it anywhere you want using your favorite graphic application like GIMP or Photoshop. When you are finished, you can also email the picture above to any email recipient by filling in the following form:

Hit that check box and they will give you a snarky message telling you to send snail mail. Does anyone really use a paper and pen anymore?

Then the message will come through with the image in the body. It will also come through with a link to view the image on their website if it did not come through properly.

Personally, I think this is great and hopefully this tool to create a font will remain free and they will add an option to download your font. Any chance of getting that application updated, PilotHandwriting guys?

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