penora

Type a string and penora animates it into natural handwriting — not a font fade-in, but stroke-by-stroke drawing driven by the glyph contours, with pen physics layered on top: pressure tapering at stroke ends, seeded jitter so each render is subtly different, and micro-wobble for that hand-drawn quality. Export the result as video or GIF.

Shipped as an npm package (npm i penora) and as a shadcn registry component you can drop straight into a project. It's the kind of small, self-contained library that's satisfying to build: a tight problem (make text look handwritten and alive) with a lot of room for craft in the details.