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Halloween · Generator

Pumpkin stencil maker

Type a name, a word or a house number and print it as a 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 when you carve. Nothing you type leaves your device.

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A printable pumpkin carving stencil spelling BOO in a stencil-safe alphabet
A sample sheet from this generator, spelling BOO.

How this stencil maker works

An ordinary typeface falls apart the moment you carve it. The counters (the enclosed holes in A, B, D, O, P, Q, R and several digits) become islands of pumpkin with nothing holding them, and they fall inside. So this page uses no font at all. Each letter is drawn in code as rectangles and simple polygons on a grid 100 units tall, with 18-unit strokes and 10-unit gaps, called bridges, wherever a counter would otherwise be sealed off, so each bridge is a tenth of the letter height. 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 letter's actual geometry, with the cut edges thickened the way a real saw cut is, and the build fails if any region of pumpkin would be left unreachable.

Choose Large, Medium or Small for letters 60, 42 or 28 mm tall, and words wrap line by line at that size. Then pick US Letter or A4, portrait or landscape, and a margin between 5 and 25 mm. When the text needs more room, all the letters shrink by the same amount, so no letter is squeezed on its own and the proportions hold. The readout shows how many letters were set and the height they came out at, and the maker puts everything on a single sheet. The sheet is an SVG in real millimeters, printed through your browser's dialog. The stamp at the foot carries the transfer method and the cut-area figure: the share of the lettering block that gets cut away, which the page works out by sampling the letter shapes. The lettering is centered between the margins, in the space above the stamp. The same text at the same settings produces the identical sheet every time, because nothing on the page is random. The sheet also works as a printable letter stencil for anything else you would cut or paint through, since the bridges keep it in one piece whatever is behind the paper.

Letters below about 20 mm carve poorly with a kitchen saw, whatever the paper says; the 6 mm minimum size is there for tracing with a marker. Set the print dialog to 100% or "Actual size". "Fit to page" shrinks the whole sheet, bridges included, 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?
The gaps hold the middles of the letters in place when you carve. 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 gaps, called bridges, placed so each enclosed counter stays connected to the rest of the pumpkin. That is the classic stencil-typeface construction. Carve up to the gaps and stop.
What characters can I use?
Uppercase A–Z and the digits 0–9, plus spaces between words, up to 60 characters. 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, the same convention this site's puzzle grids use: JOSÉ is set as JOSE, and a notice names each change (É → E) so you see it before you carve. A character with no equivalent, like a heart or an emoji, is left out, and a notice tells you so.
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 across lines so it stays on the paper, and landscape orientation buys wider lines. If the text will not fit even at the 6 mm minimum, the sheet stops at the edge of the paper and a message asks you to shorten the text or print it in parts.
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. Never cut across a white gap between segments: those are the bridges holding the centers of A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, 0, 6, 8 and 9 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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