Fed up of crap-looking printed IC documents? Read on. Beware, doing a proper job of this will probably take longer than just writing it by hand but it will look nice and you'll be able to make multiple prints and digital images etc. if you want.

You need Illustrator or similar (e.g. Inkscape) for this tutorial. I've assumed that people reading on are familiarish with Illustrator, I'm not going into mega detail about where to find all these options.

End result with left (just font) and lower mid-point stage for comparison:

1. Make some artboards the size of your final document. I've made mine A4 because I'm printing onto A4, even though I'm then going to trim the paper down.

2. Google the parchment texture of your choice and use File --> Place to insert it into the image. For the love of god make sure it's at a big enough resolution to print properly onto your paper size.

3. Draw a text box and paste your text into it. Don't make it A4 if you can help it. I don't care what size/shape it is but the best way for something to look not-printed is for it to not end up A4 sized. Therefore, plan to trim your paper once this is printed.

4. Choose the handwriting font you like the best. DO NOT choose something really fancy, first, it's unreadable, second, you'll get memory issues from the file later on. I've chosen Avocado.

5. From the Type menu, mess around with the paragraph settings until you get as 'uneven' a look as possible. You might want to negatively indent the first line as I've done here and/or change the line spacing from what's standard.

6. Choose a font colour that is not pure black. I've gone for dark brown.

7. Go to Transparency and choose Multiply.

8. Make sure your text is correct. Double check. Any edits will be a right pain in the neck from this point onwards.

9. Go to Object --> Expand.

10. Go to Object --> Path --> Simplify and choose 99% Curve Precision. You can omit this step if you don't have much text but any more than a side of text will cause memory problems and crashing if you don't do this.

11. With all your text still selected, choose a suitable brush from the Brushes Library (look in Artistic --> Ink). In my experience simpler is actually better as it's not actually drawing the letters but the outline of the letters so a fancy brush won't look right. I have made my own brushes. These are very simple inky brushes in a variety of colours - these are the ones that were used to make the Empire map (the colour version). ADD LINK TO THEM.

12. Make sure that the stroke width is appropriate for 'normal' looking text. I've used 0.25.

13. Now, we're going to make it look like the ink is running out as we write. Select some of the text that's about how long it would take the ink to run out (bearing in mind a writer would probably finish a sentence if possible) and knock down the stroke a bit, I've gone from 0.25 to 0.15. (Use shift to select multiples so you can do it all at once).Without deselecting all the text, deselect just the first 2/3 of each section - try to do this in the middle of words as well if you can. Then knock this stroke down again, I've gone down to .05.

14. Now you can deselect and mess about with the weights as you like til it looks good.

15. Because you can see the difference you should now be able to select the first couple of letters *after* each inky running out bit and make the stroke heavier (I've gone right up to 0.5) to represent the ink being very heavy here.

16. More important that the step above is to jiggle the alignment at the left (usually shift things towards the right as that's how people tend to write) and also vary slightly the spacing between the lines. That's a big giveaway of printed fonts.

17. Now, as much as you can be bothered, select individual letters and vary them. Certainly the start of some of the sentences, any important names, make those letters bigger so they break the invisible line that the font stays between. You might want to tinker with repeated letters too to make them look different when they're next to each other. Keep it subtle and focus on e.g. the start of each paragraph to get maximum effort-to-effect ratio.

18. You could stop here if you want.

19. Or, you could add some ink splatters. Use Illustrator's ink brushes for these, in the same colour as your ink. Make sure the brush is on Multiply. Don't go crazy, keep it subtle and in places where it makes sense for the nib to have jumped to create a splat. Again concentrate on the beginning and ends of lines for maximum noticeability for least effort.

20. Then add something that clearly is hand drawn like a + sign or a breaker line or something.