Pothooks

Pothooks, printable handwriting sheets

Handwriting sheets drawn in your browser and written to a file there. Type a name, choose the ruling, and take the PDF.

Take one as it stands

Each of these writes a PDF on the spot, at the ruling shown. Open the sheet itself to change the size, the hand or the letter first.

Every sheet on this site is drawn here, in the page you are reading, and the PDF is written here too. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is fetched. A name you type is set by code running in this page and never leaves your machine.

The letters are not a typeface

They are stroke alphabets, drawn from geometry as the paths a pen takes. That is the difference between tracing a letter and tracing a picture of one: an outline has two sides, so going over a printed outline means drawing every letter twice. It is also why a sheet here can put a dot where a stroke begins and number the strokes when a letter takes more than one. A typeface has no first stroke and no direction.

The ruling is the whole sheet

Everything follows from the x-height: a writing band is three x-heights of writing with air beneath it, a small letter is one x-height tall and a capital is two. Choosing that size in millimetres is the one control that matters, and it is why a worksheet printed at the wrong size is no use to the child it was printed for.

It prints in black

Handwriting paper is conventionally ruled in blue with a red dashed midline. These sheets are not, because a guide line that vanishes on a mono printer is a guide line that arrives as nothing at all. The x-height line is dashed instead, and a dash survives any printer.

Every sheet