Fun
Animated Handwritten Letter
Type your letter and a fountain pen, pencil, brush or marker writes it on paper in real handwriting — then send it as a gift link that opens from a sealed envelope.
Loading the handwriting…
Dear Anna, I wanted to write to you the old-fashioned way, one letter at a time. Thank you for every small, bright thing you bring into my days. ❤ With all my love, Sam
Send it as a gift link
The whole letter travels inside the link. Whoever opens it taps to open the envelope and watches your letter being written.
Link length: 274 of 2,000 characters. The letter is compressed into the part of the link after the # sign, which browsers never send to our server — nothing is uploaded. Anyone with the link can read it.
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This browser can’t record video from a page; the GIF, PNG and PDF still work.
Need a page to print instead? Try text to handwriting.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the letter uploaded anywhere? Who can read it?
No. The whole letter — text, style and doodles — is compressed into the part of the link after the # sign. Browsers don’t send that part to the website, so nothing is stored on our server and there is no account. The flip side is that anyone who has the link can read the letter, so only send it to the person it’s for. A link can hold a message of up to 1,200 characters.
Is the pen really writing the letters, or is it a reveal effect?
It really follows the strokes. Each handwriting is a single-line font: every letter is stored as the centre line of the pen’s path, in the order it is drawn. The pen travels along those lines, slows down in tight curves, lifts between strokes, pauses between words and lines, and dots the i’s and crosses the t’s after a cursive word, as people do. The ink width changes with the speed and, for the fountain pen and brush, with the direction of the stroke.
Which fonts are used, and what are their licences?
The four handwritings are EMS Capitol, EMS Decorous Script, EMS Neato and EMS Pancakes: single-line fonts made by Sheldon B. Michaels for Evil Mad Scientist’s Hershey Text project from Sacramento, Petit Formal Script, Bad Script and Short Stack. They are released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; the licence and credits are published with the stroke files in /fonts/handwriting-strokes/. The paper, envelope, pens and doodles are drawn by code written for this page.
Does it work with Turkish letters and other accents?
Yes. Turkish ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş and ü are in all four handwritings, as are the common accented letters of French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and the Nordic languages. Letters a font lacks, such as Polish ł, ż and ą, Hungarian ő and ű or Czech ř, are built from the base letter plus an accent stroke, usually the font’s own accent. Digits and punctuation work too. Emoji and scripts such as Chinese or Arabic can’t be handwritten and are left out, but ❤, ★, ✿, ☺ and ✨ in your message are drawn by the pen as doodles.
What video formats can I download?
The video is recorded from the animation as it plays, so recording takes as long as the animation at the chosen speed. Chrome, Edge and Firefox save WebM, and Safari and recent versions of Chrome save MP4 — the buttons show what your browser can make. If you turned on the music box, the tune is recorded too. The animated GIF is made frame by frame at 480 × 600 pixels, sped up for long letters. The PNG and the A4 PDF contain the finished letter.
Will the recipient hear music or see the animation straight away?
The letter opens with a “Tap to open your letter” cover, because browsers only allow sound after a tap. Music is off unless you switch it on; it is a short music-box tune synthesised in the browser, so no audio file is downloaded. If the recipient’s device asks for reduced motion, the finished letter fades in instead of being written, and it can still be played on request.
About this tool
An animated handwritten letter is a small, personal way to say something that matters: a love letter for an anniversary or Valentine’s Day, a thank-you note, a birthday message or an apology. You type the words, and a pen writes them on paper stroke by stroke, like a film of the letter being written. It is sent as a link, so the person you send it to can open it on a phone or a computer without installing anything.
The handwriting is made from single-stroke fonts. An ordinary font stores the outline of each letter, which can only be revealed or faded in; a single-stroke font stores the path of the pen itself. That is what lets the pen tip follow the letters in order, slow down on curves, lift between strokes and take a breath between words, and lets the ink swell where the pen moves slowly. Accented letters the font doesn’t include are composed from a base letter and an accent stroke, so a letter in Turkish, Polish or Hungarian is written as naturally as one in English.
The sheet can be cream lined paper, vintage parchment, kraft, pastel rose or midnight blue with gold ink, and the letter can slide out of an envelope sealed with wax. Doodles — hearts, stars, flowers, a smiley, a swirl, a leafy sprig, an underline swash or a signature flourish — are drawn by the pen as well, wherever you place them. An optional music-box tune is generated in the browser.
Everything happens in your browser: the letter is never uploaded, the link carries it, and the video, GIF, PNG and PDF downloads are made on your device. For a printable page in a handwriting font rather than an animation, the text to handwriting tool is the better fit.