A handwritten note is drawn: a pen moves across the paper and leaves a line of ink, often with a faint dent. A handwriting font is printed: a printer lays down the letter shapes in one pass, and every "e" is the same "e." Most people can tell by tilting the card under a lamp and comparing two of the same letter.
This guide explains the difference, the checks recipients make without thinking, what the research says about handwritten mail, and where a machine-held pen fits.
What is the difference between a handwritten note and a handwriting font?
The difference is how the letters get onto the paper. With a pen, a tip moves along each letter and leaves a line of ink behind it. With a handwriting font, a computer stores each letter as a filled shape, and a printer fills those shapes with toner or ink dots. The font looks like handwriting. It is made like any other printed page.
Laser printers make the gap bigger. Laser toner is a fine powder of dry plastic mixed with carbon black or color, and the printer's fuser bonds it to the paper with pressure and heat of up to 427 °C (Wikipedia: Laser printing). So printed "handwriting" is a thin layer of melted plastic sitting on the paper. Pen ink is a liquid that soaks into it.
There is a third kind, and it matters for business mail: a machine that holds a real pen. The oldest is the autopen, which presidents have used to sign letters and laws. A modern autopen is programmed with a signature and moves a pen with a motorized arm (Wikipedia: Autopen). Pen plotters work the same way for whole messages. The ink is real. What a person's hand adds is variation, as the next section shows.
How can you tell if a card is really handwritten?
Make four checks. Tilt the card under a lamp and look for a groove along the letters. Find two of the same letter and compare them. Look closely at where lines start and stop. Then run a fingertip over the words. Printed fonts fail the first three checks. A pen held by a machine passes the ink checks and fails the letter check.
- Tilt it to the light. Pressing a pen into paper leaves an indented impression. Forensic document examiners use special lighting to reveal these dents, because they come from the pressure of writing or from a mechanical means of printing (NFSTC). A laser-printed font has no groove. It can have a slight shine where the toner sits.
- Compare two of the same letter. This is the strongest test. The National Forensic Science Technology Center's guide puts it plainly: no one writes with machine-like precision every time, and a page of the same signature will vary slightly from one to the next. A font prints every "a" from the same file. Some fonts swap between two or three versions of a letter, which helps until you spot the pattern.
- Look at the line ends. A pen line is one stroke with a start and an end, and examiners read speed, pen position and hesitations from it. A printed font letter is a filled shape, with the same even edge all the way round.
- Feel it. A firm pen leaves a dent you can sometimes feel with a fingertip. A printed font feels as flat as the rest of the page.
The autopen shows where a machine-held pen sits. Its signatures are made with even pressure and an even dent, which is how examiners tell them from a person's, whose pressure varies, and each copy matches the last (Wikipedia: Autopen). A pen plotter is close to that. It passes the ink tests, and a careful reader comparing two of the same letter will see they match.
Does a printed handwriting font still work?
Sometimes, and less than people hope. In one study a handwriting-style font did make people feel a person was behind a product, and they rated it more warmly. But the effect shrank for brands people already loved, and reversed for practical products. A font can suggest a human. It cannot pass the letter test on paper.
The study is by Roland Schroll, Benedikt Schnurr and Dhruv Grewal, in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2018. Across lab and field studies, handwritten typefaces created a sense of human presence, which led to better product ratings through stronger emotional attachment. For products sold on function, such as tools or building supplies, a machine typeface did better (Schroll, Schnurr and Grewal).
That fits how people react to effort. A 2024 paper by Shirley Bluvstein and colleagues ran five experiments with 3,399 people in total, and found that customer service agents who made a typo and then corrected it seemed more human than agents who made none (Bluvstein and colleagues, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research). Small signs of a real process count. A font that is too even, on a card that should feel personal, sends the opposite signal.
What does research say about handwritten mail and response?
Handwritten requests get more replies. In Randy Garner's 2005 study, survey packets with a handwritten sticky note came back 76 per cent of the time, against 36 per cent with no note. When Ireland's tax office tried it in 2013, a handwritten note lifted survey returns from 19.2 per cent to 36 per cent within 15 working days (Behavioural Insights Team).
Physical mail also lasts longer than a screen. Royal Mail MarketReach found that advertising mail stays in a UK household for 17 days on average, that 57 per cent of people say receiving mail makes them feel more valued, and that in psychology experiments people value something they can see and touch 24 per cent more than something they can only see (Royal Mail MarketReach, The Private Life of Mail, 2015).
A US Postal Service Office of Inspector General study with Temple University's Center for Neural Decision Making found the same pattern in the brain. A week after seeing them, people remembered physical ads more quickly and confidently than digital ones, and brain activity showed more subconscious desire for products advertised on paper (USPS OIG, 2015).
On the writer's side, people underrate their own notes. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people who wrote letters of thanks underestimated how surprised and how happy the readers would be (University of Chicago News).
One honest gap: we found no published study that puts a pen-written card and a font-printed card side by side and counts the replies. The studies above compare handwriting with no handwriting, and paper with screens. The checks in the last section suggest which side a font falls on.
How does MailMyCard write a card?
With a real pen. You type the message, and a pen plotter (a machine that moves a pen across the card) writes it in blue or black ink. The pen follows one line per stroke, like a person tracing the letter, not the filled outline a font prints. If the card has a printed design, the printer does that first and the pen writes afterwards.
You can choose from twelve handwriting styles, each shown as the pen writes it on our handwriting styles page, with lettering for other alphabets too. Or you can give the pen your own handwriting: write 74 characters (small letters, capitals, numbers and common punctuation) on a printed sheet and add a photo, or draw them on your screen. The pen then follows the strokes you drew.
What we do not claim: like an autopen, our pen does not vary its letters the way a hand does. Each letter in a hand follows the same path each time it appears. So the card passes the ink checks above, and a reader who compares two "e"s closely will see they match. It is real ink, written by a pen, with your words. It is not your hand moving the pen, and you should not tell anyone it was.
Businesses use it for cards that would never get written by hand otherwise: a thank-you in every online order, a note when a deal is won, a card on a renewal date. Our guides to post-purchase thank-you cards and handwritten notes in sales show what to write. The connections to shops and CRMs are on the For business page, and the API is in the developer docs.
When is a handwriting font good enough?
Use a font when nobody expects a person to have written it: packaging, a menu, a social post, a printed flyer, a sign in a shop. Use a pen when the card says thank you, asks a favor, or carries a person's name and signature. A font pretending to be a letter is the one case that backfires, because the reader can check.
A few plain rules for business cards:
- Do not fake it. A printed font with a "handwritten" note from the CEO is the worst of both. If the reader spots it, the whole card reads as a trick.
- Make the words personal. A pen card with a generic message is still a form letter. One true detail does more than any hand.
- Sign with a real name. A card signed by "The Team" is read like a flyer. Our guide on how to sign off a thank you card covers closings and who signs.
- Be honest if asked. "Written with a pen, from my words" is true and nobody minds it. "I wrote this myself" is not true if a machine did.
The thank-you itself matters more than the tool. Our note on thanking customers of a small business has thirty examples you can send by any means.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Laser printing: en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, Autopen: en.wikipedia.org
- National Forensic Science Technology Center, A Simplified Guide to Forensic Document Examination: forensicsciencesimplified.org
- Schroll, R., Schnurr, B. and Grewal, D. (2018), "Humanizing Products with Handwritten Typefaces", Journal of Consumer Research: doi.org
- Bluvstein, S., Zhao, X., Barasch, A. and colleagues (2024), "Imperfectly Human: The Humanizing Potential of (Corrected) Errors in Text-Based Communication", Journal of the Association for Consumer Research: escholarship.org
- Garner, R. (2005), "Post-It Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence", Journal of Consumer Psychology, and the Irish Revenue Commissioners trial (2013), summarised by the Behavioural Insights Team
- Royal Mail MarketReach, The Private Life of Mail: Mail in the Home, Heart and Head, February 2015: royalmailwholesale.com
- US Postal Service Office of Inspector General, Enhancing the Value of the Mail: The Human Response, RARC-WP-15-012, June 2015: uspsoig.gov
- Kumar, A. and Epley, N. (2018), "Undervaluing Gratitude", Psychological Science, via University of Chicago News
