How these sheets are made

Pothooks and hangers is the old name for the first exercises in a copybook: the hook and the vertical that every letter is assembled from, practised before a child is shown a letter at all. It is the right name for a press that draws its letters out of strokes.

Two alphabets, drawn not set

There is a print alphabet and a joined one. Neither is a typeface: each letter is a list of strokes in the order a hand makes them, which is what lets a sheet show where to start and which way to go.

The joined hand is built from the movements a cursive scheme teaches – the undercurve, the overcurve, the oval, the shoulder, the ascender loop and the descender loop – because twenty-six letters drawn freehand do not match each other and six movements assembled do. Every letter enters at the baseline and leaves at the baseline, which is what makes the joins work: set one letter after another and the exit of one lands exactly where the next begins.

Every figure is worked out twice

Anything this site states about a sheet is computed by two routes that share no code. One reads the marks back off the drawing; the other works the answer out from the paper size and the ruling. Where they disagree, the sheet is not described at all rather than described wrongly.

A letter it cannot write is reported

The hand here covers the unaccented Latin alphabet, the digits, and a hyphen, an apostrophe and a full stop. A name carrying anything else is refused rather than set without it, because silently dropping an accent turns one name into a different one, on a sheet made for somebody to practise their own.