Design tools and the web

Design tools

Adobe apps, Affinity, Figma, Canva, Procreate all apply everything — your joins, your variation, your kerning. Install the font and it appears in their font list like any other.

These are the best places to see what your font actually contains, which makes them a useful reference when another app looks wrong. It looks different in one app.

Browsers

Everything applies. If you want to check your font honestly, type into any web page that lets you choose a font — a browser holds nothing back.

Google Docs

Google Docs cannot use your font. Its font list comes from Google Fonts, and there is no way to upload your own — not on a personal account, and not through Workspace settings. That is Google's design, and nothing about your font file changes it.

What does work: write somewhere that can use your font and export a PDF, or paste an image of your text. Both carry your handwriting into a Doc without anyone installing anything.

Putting your font on a website

Websites use a compressed web format rather than the file you install on your computer. It loads faster and is what browsers expect.

The web format is part of Pro. See What Pro adds to your font and the pricing page.

You would upload that file to your site and reference it in your stylesheet. If you are using a site builder, look for a custom-font upload in its theme settings — not every builder offers it.

Stylesheet to start from

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Your Hand';
  src: url('your-hand.woff2') format('woff2');
}

.your-hand {
  font-family: 'Your Hand', cursive;
  font-feature-settings: "liga" 1, "clig" 1, "calt" 1;
}

That last line does more than it looks. Setting letter-spacing to anything other than zero switches off your joins and the variation between repeated letters — the whole of what Pro adds to your font — and nothing on the page tells you it happened. Keeping font-feature-settings in your rule holds them on.

We measured this in Chrome, down to a quarter of a pixel; other browsers may do the same. font-variant-ligatures does not bring your joins back — only font-feature-settings does.

Sending someone a document

You do not need them to have your font. Export a PDF and your handwriting travels inside it, because your font is marked as freely embeddable. They see your hand without installing anything. Who owns your font.