Alphabet tracing sheets

The sheet drawn on this page is titled Alphabet tracing, capitals and small letters, 3 lines, Junior, 7mm. It is one side of A4, 210 by 297 millimetres, ruled into ten writing lines. The subject is not a single letter but the whole alphabet, capitals followed by small letters, set once through. As with every sheet here it is drawn in the browser and the PDF is written there too.

The alphabet does not fit on one line

At a 7 millimetre x-height, the capitals and the small letters together run wider than a sheet of A4, so the subject wraps. On this sheet it falls across three lines:

• ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ
• RSTUVWXYZabcdefghi
• jklmnopqrstuvwxyz

The break lands where the paper runs out rather than where the alphabet has a joint. The capitals stop after Q, and the second line runs from R straight through Z into the small letters and ends at i. Change the ruling and the wrap lands somewhere else, but the plan for the other sizes is 12mm takes six lines; 9mm takes four lines; 7mm takes three lines; 5mm takes two lines

What the ruling measures

The x-height is the height of a small letter without an ascender or descender, and everything else on the page is built from it. Here it is 7 millimetres, the ruling named Junior. A small letter stands one x-height tall, a capital stands two, and the writing band comes to 24.5 millimetres. Ten of those bands fill the page. Each band is ruled with four lines: the ascender line, the x-height line, the baseline and the descender line. The guides control reduces that to three lines or to the baseline alone.

Three rows written, seven ruled and empty

All three of the written rows on this sheet are dotted, to be gone over. There is no solid model row here and no start dots are printed on it, so the whole subject arrives as 112 dotted strokes and nothing else. The seven rows beneath are ruled and empty. The page is ruled to its foot whether or not letters are printed on the last lines, which is what those lines are for.

It prints in black

Ruled handwriting paper is usually blue with a red dashed midline. This is drawn in black, because guide lines in pale colour disappear on a mono printer and a sheet whose guide lines have vanished is a sheet with no guide lines. The x-height line is dashed rather than coloured, which any printer can reproduce.

Drawn as strokes

The letters are stroke alphabets rather than a typeface: geometry describing the path a pen takes, not the outline the ink fills. Trace an outline and the letter gets drawn twice, once down each edge. Because the letters are paths, the sheet can put a dot where a stroke begins and number the strokes where a letter takes more than one, neither of which a font is able to do. The print alphabet on this site runs to 66 glyphs and the cursive alphabet to 30, and the script control switches between them.

What it will not set

A subject too wide for the paper and a ruling too small to write in are both refused, and both look fine on screen. The alphabet is the widest subject here, and on A4 the largest ruling it still fits at is the nursery size, 12 millimetres, because it wraps to more lines as it grows.

The sheet is offered as PDF, PNG or SVG, and this PDF is 16,171 bytes. There is no letter to choose on an alphabet sheet, and the controls list none: they are the script, the letter case, the size, the guides, the start dots, the paper and landscape.