The joins don't show

Your writing is joined-up, but the finished font sets the letters apart. Three causes, in the order worth checking.

1. The font is Free

Joins are part of Pro. A Free font contains your letters, evenly spaced, with no connections between them, so a cursive hand comes out as separate shapes.

This is the most visible difference between the tiers on a connected hand — more than the variation or the kerning. See What Pro adds to your font.

2. The app is not applying them

If the joins show in one place and not another, the app is the difference.

- PowerPoint applies no joins, in every version, on every platform. Your letters, spacing and kerning still come through. More - An old Word document in compatibility mode switches off modern font features. A new document is fine. Using your font in Word - An older font file may not carry the joins in the way Word reads. Remake and re-download.

Browsers, design tools, print and current Word all apply them.

3. The joins are not in your hand yet

A join is a real connected pair you wrote — not a gap closed by moving letters together. If the pairs you are typing were never written joined, there is nothing for the font to use.

The richest source is writing whole words rather than single letters, where the connections happen naturally.

What no font can do

Even with joins, a font places fixed shapes side by side. Real writing shapes every letter by the one before it, continuously — which no font format holds. Your joins get much closer to it; they do not reproduce it. What Inkling does — and what it can't.