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Halloween · Generator

Pumpkin stencil maker

Type a name, a word, or a house number and get a printable carving stencil — BOO, the family name over the door, anything up to a sheetful. The letters are set in a stencil-safe alphabet built from geometric segments with bridge gaps, so the middle of every A, B and O stays attached to the pumpkin instead of falling inside it. Nothing you type leaves your device.

Sheet— Text— Letters— Cut area— Pages—

How this stencil maker works

The hard problem in a text stencil is not drawing letters — it is drawing letters that survive being cut out. Any ordinary typeface fails the moment you carve it: the counters (the enclosed holes in A, B, D, O, P, Q, R and most digits) become islands of pumpkin with nothing holding them, and they fall inside. So this page does not use a font at all. Every letterform is authored in code as a set of rectangles and simple polygons on a fixed grid, with 18-unit strokes and deliberate 10-unit gaps — bridges — placed exactly where a counter would otherwise be sealed off: bowls detach from stems in B, D, P and R, rings break at the sides in O, Q, 0 and 8, and the A keeps its apex open. The site's tests flood-fill every glyph's actual geometry, with the cut edges thickened the way a real saw cut is, and fail the build if any region of pumpkin would be left unreachable.

Layout is plain arithmetic on that same grid. Words wrap line by line at your chosen letter size; if a line or the block would overflow the sheet, every letter scales down together — never squeezed per-letter, so proportions hold — and the notice tells you the size it settled on. A single word too long for any line is split rather than run off the paper. The sheet is SVG in real millimeters printed through your browser's dialog, and the stamp at the foot carries the transfer method plus the measured cut-area figure, computed by sampling the letter geometry, not guessed. The whole thing is deterministic: the same text at the same settings produces the identical sheet every time, with no seed needed because nothing is random.

The honest limits. The alphabet is uppercase A–Z and 0–9: lowercase is set as uppercase, accents fold to their base letter (JOSÉ becomes JOSE), and anything unrepresentable is named in a notice rather than dropped in silence. The same sheet is a printable letter stencil for anything else you would cut or paint through — bridges are what make a stencil cuttable, and they do not care what is behind the paper. Letters below about 20 mm carve poorly with a kitchen saw regardless of what the paper says — the 6 mm layout floor exists for marker-tracing, not for carving. And the print dialog must be at 100% or "Actual size": "Fit to page" shrinks the bridges first, and the bridges are the one part of a stencil you cannot afford to lose.

Frequently asked questions

Why do the letters have gaps in them?
Because a stencil letter has to survive being cut out. In a normal typeface the middle of an O is an island: cut the O from a pumpkin and its center falls inside. Every letterform here is built from separate geometric segments with deliberate gaps — bridges — placed so each enclosed counter stays connected to the rest of the pumpkin. That is the classic stencil-typeface construction, and it is the whole reason this page exists. The gaps are load-bearing: carve up to them and stop.
What characters can I use?
Uppercase A–Z and the digits 0–9, plus spaces between words. That makes the sheet a set of printable letter stencils and printable number stencils as much as a pumpkin one. Lowercase is set as uppercase, and accented letters fold to their base letter — JOSÉ is set as JOSE — which is the same convention this site's puzzle grids use. A character with no equivalent, like a heart or an emoji, is named in a notice rather than dropped in silence.
Will a long name fit on one sheet?
Yes, within reason: words wrap onto new lines, and if the text still does not fit at your chosen letter size, every letter is scaled down together until it does — the page tells you the size it settled on. A word too long for any line is split rather than run off the paper. Landscape orientation buys wider lines, and only truly enormous text is refused with a message instead of printed illegibly at the 6 mm floor.
How do I carve letters cleanly?
Print at 100%, tape the sheet to the pumpkin, and poke holes along every black edge — the corners of each segment matter most, so give every corner its own hole. Carve the small inner cuts before the big outer ones, so the shell around each letter keeps its strength as long as possible, and never cut across a white gap between segments: those are the bridges holding the centers of A, B, D, O, P, Q, R and the digits in place.
Is the name I type uploaded or stored?
No. The text you type is read by this page, set as vector geometry in your browser, and printed through your browser's own dialog. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account or watermark, and no settings are saved — close the tab and it is gone.

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