Methods and systems for rendering text to simulate human penmanship are described. A text rendering engine converts a text string into an image that can be displayed using one or more seed numbers to influence the rendering and appearance of the text. The text rendering engine may render variations of each character of the text string using the seed numbers to select from a set of single-character or multi-character glyphs, or to modify a size, weight, slope, or Bezier curve point of the character.