A small desk, a lamp, and a pen that never gets tired.
PenPigeon takes a photo and a typed note and turns them into a postcard: your photo printed on the front, your words drawn on the back by a plotter pen, then stamped and mailed. The handwriting engine is the hard part, and it was built from scratch — the postcard is what it's for.
Why a postcard
A pen plotter will draw a path the same way every time. What it can't do on its own is look human: the slight drift, the uneven spacing, the little shake in a line. That's the part we wrote.
So you crop a photo, pick a hand (or trace your own from one photo of your writing), type a few lines, and the pen draws it. Then it goes in the mail.
The layout and the stroke path you see in the wizard are exactly what the plotter draws. Nothing is faked for the preview.
Runs where you are
The preview runs entirely in your browser. Your photo and note only leave your device when you sign in and send one for real.
Public-domain letterforms
The five bundled scripts are Hershey engraving fonts — public-domain vector letterforms originally drawn for pen plotters and oscilloscope displays.
Two files, one pipeline
Every postcard produces the same pair of outputs a real print-and-plot setup would need — raster images for print, one vector path for the pen.
Frequently asked
Is this a real product I can buy?
Yes. Sign in, build a card, pay $4, and it gets printed, drawn, stamped, and mailed to a US address. The Create page lets you build one without an account so you can see it work first.
Where does my photo go?
For the free preview on the Create page, nowhere — it all runs in your browser. When you sign in and send one, your photo and the finished files are stored on our backend so we can print and plot it, and deleted with your account if you close it.
Can I use my own handwriting instead of the bundled fonts?
Yes — upload a .ttf or .otf font file on the Handwriting step. It gets traced down to a single-stroke skeleton and run through the same spacing and jitter pipeline as the bundled scripts.
Why does the same note look a little different every time?
Small randomized jitter, tremor, and baseline wobble get layered on top of the base letterforms, so no two renders of the same text land on the page identically — the same way a real hand never traces a word exactly the same way twice.
What actually comes out at the end?
Four files: a front image, a back image with the address printed and the message area left blank, a standalone message.svg with the plotted pen path, and a combined preview image showing what the finished postcard would look like.
What happens to my note and address after I close the tab?
On the free Create page, closing the tab clears everything — download the files first if you want them. Signed in, your orders and saved handwriting stick around in your account until you delete them.