The machine that holds the pen.

What the machine is

A writing machine we built in our shop in Abilene, Texas. It holds a real ballpoint pen in a gripper and moves it across the paper on two rails, the way a hand moves: down for a stroke, up between words, a little slower on the curves. It writes in one of 57 handwriting styles we recorded from real people. It is not a printer. There is no toner, no ink-jet and no handwriting font. If you hold a finished letter to the light you can see where the pen pressed.

Is a machine-written letter still handwritten?

The pen is real, the ink is real, and the strokes are real. What is not real is the hand. We say that plainly on every page because the alternative, pretending, would ruin the thing we are selling. Here is how we think about it: the letter is yours if the words are yours. We never write a word for you and we never change one. We just hold the pen for people who would otherwise never send the letter at all.

Is it cheating?

If you are hiding it, it probably feels like it. So do not hide it. Tell her: "I typed it, a machine with a real pen wrote it, because my handwriting is a crime." What people are actually upset by is never getting a letter. We built this for the guy who has meant to write one for three years.

What it is not

• Not AI-written. You write it. There are starters in the editor for when you are stuck; they are prompts, not ghostwriting.
• Not a font. Each style comes from a real person's hand, and the machine varies the strokes a little every time, the way a hand does.
• Not a bulk mailer. One letter at a time, read by one person before it is sealed, never used as an example.

Why we built it

Chris runs a print shop. People kept asking for something a printer cannot do: a letter that looks and feels like a person wrote it. Printing a handwriting font looked wrong on paper every time. So we built a machine that holds a pen instead.

What it means for your letter

The preview you approve on screen is the exact path the pen follows, down to the pen lifts. Your words, in the hand you chose, at the size you chose, on the paper you chose. How the whole thing works, and the 57 hands.