Cursive GeneratorWhat the numbers mean
x-height is the height of a lowercase x as a share of the em. Faces below about 0.3 look elegant large and vanish small; above 0.35 they stay readable in a caption or on skin. Slant is the measured angle of the upright strokes; most script sits between 10° and 20°. Joins say whether the lowercase letters connect: fully joined faces read as continuous handwriting, semi-joined faces break at certain pairs by design, unjoined faces set letters apart. Swash extent measures how far flourishes reach beyond the letter body; high values cause clipped edges in tight layouts and blur in tattoos.
Comparing fairly
Use the same text in each column, ideally the words you will print, and include a capital and a descender. Look at the joins on common pairs such as "th", "oo" and "ll", and at how the capital connects, or fails to, with the letter after it. Two faces can share every number and still feel different; the metrics narrow the field, the preview decides.
Where the metrics come from
Every value is measured from the font file at build time, not copied from a marketing page: x-height from the ink of the lowercase x, z, v, w and u, cap height from the capitals, slant from the lean of the lowercase l, join class from an automated audit that renders 676 letter pairs and checks whether the outlines touch, swash extent from the glyph bounding boxes. The full set is published on each font's page together with its licence facts, and the values update whenever the catalogue is rebuilt.
Reading the table on a phone
Columns stack two across on narrow screens and the preview scrolls sideways inside its card, so the page never scrolls horizontally. Long text is the better test on a phone, because a single word hides spacing problems that a sentence reveals.
Typical comparisons
Wedding stationery usually comes down to Great Vibes against Allura: the first has the taller loops, the second the cleaner small sizes. For a logo, compare Pacifico, Lobster and Sacramento to see how far weight and joins diverge at the same size. For a tattoo, set Kaushan Script beside Dancing Script and read the lowercase l, t and capital I in each; the one that stays unambiguous is the safer choice. For a classroom hand, put an instructional face beside a display script and the difference in loops and entry strokes shows why worksheets never use display fonts.
After you decide
Each column names its font. The font page has the full metrics, the licence facts and the same live preview, and the generator opens with that font selected so the export panel is one click away.