Write a letter in your own handwriting online

Some letters should be handwritten: a note to a grandparent, a sympathy card, a love letter, a letter a child will keep. But a pen page with crossed-out words is hard to send, and a typed one feels like a memo. Penmark lets you write the letter at the keyboard, rewrite it as many times as you like, and print it in your own handwriting.

Languages, no fine print: Penmark writes the Latin letters a-z without accents (so English, Indonesian and Tagalog are written in full), Hebrew without niqqud, digits and math. It does not write Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, Nepali), Arabic or Urdu script, Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian), or accented Latin letters such as á, ñ, ü, ç and ş. In Spanish, Turkish, German or French text those letters are left out, and the tool lists which ones.

How it works

1. Write the letter in any editor first, until it says what you mean
2. Open Penmark and load your own handwriting (fill the template once, about 10-20 minutes in total) or pick a ready-made hand
3. Paste the letter with the date, greeting, paragraphs, closing and name each on its own line
4. Choose blank or lined paper and blue or black ink, check names in the preview, and tune the size
5. Download the PDF or PNG, print it at 100 percent or send it, and sign it by hand

Try it free, a ready-made hand and a first page in seconds

The letters people write this way

Letters to grandparents who do not read email, and who keep every page. Sympathy notes, where the right words take three drafts and a page full of corrections would hurt. Love letters and anniversary letters that should look like you wrote them, not like a form. Letters to a child at camp, a teacher at the end of the year, a friend going through something hard. In each case the words come first and the handwriting is how they should arrive.

Typing first changes how these letters get written. You can say it badly, fix it, move a paragraph, and only then turn it into a page. Penmark never rewrites the wording: if you drafted with help, paste the final version, and those are the words on the page. Characters your handwriting does not have are left blank and listed before you download, and curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses are simplified to plain marks.

Handwritten letter from text: what actually happens

You type, and the engine draws each character from a library of real handwriting. With your own library, that is your letters, captured three times each from a template and alternated, so a word that appears twice does not look stamped. With a ready-made hand it is one of 90 styles, which is fine for a note to someone who has never seen your writing.

A full page holds about 100 words at the default size, so a one-page letter is short and warm, and a long one runs to two or three pages. The letter generator guide has the layout details. For a grandparent's own handwriting, captured so new letters can be written in it, see preserving a handwriting.

Is a printed handwritten letter honest?

It is your letter, in your words and your letters, the way a printed photo is still your photo. Sign it by hand, add a line in pen if you like, and nobody is misled about who wrote it. What we would not do is use it to pass off someone else's writing as yours, and the tool is built around capturing your own hand for that reason.

Some characters need a second look: accented letters in names, the symbols at, ampersand, hash and dollar, and signs such as a heart, a star or a copyright mark are not in the 155-character template, so they are left blank and listed. A few typographic marks are simplified by themselves: curly quotes and apostrophes become straight, long dashes become a short dash, and an ellipsis becomes three dots.

Questions & answers

Try it free, a ready-made hand and a first page in seconds

Penmark in numbers

Price

Free, no account

Characters captured

155 in one template: Hebrew with final letters, English, digits, punctuation, math symbols and Greek

Time to set up

About 10-20 minutes in total, once. Or skip it: 90 ready-made hands work immediately

Variations per character

Three, from the three times you write each character

Languages

Hebrew and English in one sentence, plus math, and any language written in plain a-z (Indonesian, Tagalog). No niqqud, Hindi, Arabic, Cyrillic or accented letters

Output

PDF, Word (docx) or PNG on lined, grid, dotted or blank paper

Privacy

Library saved in your browser for reuse; the server's copy is deleted with your uploads within about 24 hours

Not included

No installable font file, no tables or graphs, no OCR of scans

Related pages

• Handwritten letter generator
• Preserve a handwriting
• Thank-you cards in your handwriting
• Holiday cards in your handwriting
• Text to handwriting