Comparison
A Calligraphr alternative that needs no printer
Calligraphr is the tool most people find first, and for a lot of them it stops in the same place: a template that wants a printer. This starts from the ruled notebook already on your desk.
The difference that decides it
Both products do the same thing in outline. You write out an alphabet, you hand over a picture of it, you get a font file back. The difference is what you have to write on.
Calligraphr begins with a template. You download it, print it, and fill in its boxes. That is a reasonable design and it is also the step where most people give up, because a working printer at the moment you want one is not a thing most people have any more.
Here the page is the ruled notebook you already own, at whatever line spacing it happens to have. There are no boxes to write inside, because the printed rules are already a grid, and a grid that a factory printed is more reliably parallel than anything you would have got out of a home printer anyway. If you would rather print, the sheet is there, but it is an option and not the road.
Side by side
| myhand.ink | Calligraphr | |
|---|---|---|
| What you write on | Any ruled notebook you own | A template you print or fill in on a tablet |
| Steps to a font | Write, photograph, done | Download, print, fill, scan, upload |
| Where your page goes | Nowhere. The photo is processed in your browser | Uploaded to their service |
| Account | None. No signup form exists | Sign-up required |
| Paying | $19 once, for that font | A free tier, then a subscription |
Their plans, limits and features move. This compares how the two products are shaped, not today’s price list, and you should read theirs before deciding.
Your photograph does not leave your device
This is architecture rather than a promise. The work of reading the page happens in your browser: the photo is decoded, the ruling is found and used to correct the page’s perspective, the printed rules are removed, the ink is reduced to black and white, and the page is cut into 81 labelled letter shapes.
What crosses the wire is about 100KB of one-bit bitmaps, which is the letters and nothing else. The photograph has nowhere to go, because there is no file storage anywhere in this product. A page of your own handwriting usually carries more than letterforms, which is the reason to build it this way round.
One payment, and the file is a file
$19 opens one font, once. There is no plan to leave, and the .ttf and .otf you download are ordinary font files that keep working whatever happens to us. Seeing the font render, and the link you can send someone, are free and sit in front of the payment, so you watch your own sentence set in your own hand before you decide anything.
Where Calligraphr is the better answer
It is a deeper product, and there are people who should use it. If you need more than the 81 characters this version captures, if you want accented characters or a script other than Latin, if you want control over ligatures, or if you want to draw on a tablet rather than on paper, that is theirs and not ours.
What this version will not do is give you the joins in fully cursive handwriting. A word written without lifting the pen cannot be cut into letters without guessing, and this pipeline does not guess. The method page is explicit about all of it.
What you get here that you would not expect
The last thing the sheet asks for is a sentence of your choosing in your ordinary handwriting. It is there to measure your word gaps, slant and stroke weight, but it pays for itself twice: where a word in it comes apart cleanly, each letter is kept as a second form, and the finished font alternates between the two. A double letter stops being a photocopy of itself, which is the single most obvious tell of a handwriting font that is not one.
Five minutes of writing, no printer, no account. The questions people ask before they start.