I’ve been building a small side project called FontCraft over the last month.
The idea started because my girlfriend (a designer) wanted to create a handwriting font for journaling and some client work. The tools she tried mostly relied on downloading templates, filling them in, scanning them, and uploading them again. It worked, but the workflow felt pretty clunky.
So I started building a browser based tool where you can draw the glyphs directly and see the font generate live.
The workflow looks like this:
1. Draw letters directly in the browser
2. Adjust spacing and alignment in a refine mode
3. Preview the font and Export it as TTF, OTF or WOFF2 in build mode
It works particularly well on an iPad with Apple Pencil, though it also supports the classic template upload workflow.
Some technical challenges were around making the drawing feel good. I spent quite a bit of time working on pen smoothing and stroke rendering so letters feel natural to draw rather than jagged or laggy.
The project has only been live about two weeks but around 80 users have created roughly 100 fonts so far.
There’s a free tier where you can create one font with A–Z, a–z and 0–9.
I’m still actively developing it and would love feedback from HN, especially around, the drawing experience, the glyph editing workflow, missing type design features, general UX
Happy to answer questions about the implementation too!
richardcrosby•1h ago
I’ve been building a small side project called FontCraft over the last month.
The idea started because my girlfriend (a designer) wanted to create a handwriting font for journaling and some client work. The tools she tried mostly relied on downloading templates, filling them in, scanning them, and uploading them again. It worked, but the workflow felt pretty clunky.
So I started building a browser based tool where you can draw the glyphs directly and see the font generate live.
The workflow looks like this: 1. Draw letters directly in the browser 2. Adjust spacing and alignment in a refine mode 3. Preview the font and Export it as TTF, OTF or WOFF2 in build mode
It works particularly well on an iPad with Apple Pencil, though it also supports the classic template upload workflow.
Some technical challenges were around making the drawing feel good. I spent quite a bit of time working on pen smoothing and stroke rendering so letters feel natural to draw rather than jagged or laggy.
The project has only been live about two weeks but around 80 users have created roughly 100 fonts so far.
There’s a free tier where you can create one font with A–Z, a–z and 0–9.
I’m still actively developing it and would love feedback from HN, especially around, the drawing experience, the glyph editing workflow, missing type design features, general UX
Happy to answer questions about the implementation too!