Cursive alphabet

The sheet on this page

The sheet is Cursive alphabet tracing, small letters, 2 lines, Infant, 9mm. Its subject is the small letters from a to z. The alphabet is longer than one line of A4 at this size, so the drawing wraps it across two rows: abcdefghijklmnopqrst on the first and uvwxyz on the second. The paper is A4, 210 by 297 mm, with 8 lines on it, each a band 31.5 mm deep ruled with 4 rules, and an x-height of 9 mm.

Unlike the word sheets, this one has no model row. Both written rows are dotted rows to go over, and 6 ruled rows follow with nothing in them. So there are 2 written rows and 30 strokes on the sheet, all of them dotted and none of them solid. The PDF comes to 10,453 bytes.

The stroke count and the letter count are not the same number, and they are not meant to be. A letter that carries a dot or a crossbar is finished with a second stroke after the body of it is drawn, so it appears more than once in the total.

The movements behind the letters

These letters are not a typeface. They are assembled from a small set of movements: the undercurve, the overcurve, the oval, the shoulder, the ascender loop and the descender loop. An alphabet drawn freehand, letter after letter, does not match itself. A movement reused across many letters is the same movement every time it appears, so the row is consistent by construction rather than by care.

Every one of them enters at the baseline and leaves at the baseline. That is the property that makes the joins work: the exit of one letter lands where the next begins, so letters set in sequence join with no special cases. In a formal hand o, b, v and w would finish at x-height instead; here they carry their tail down to the baseline like the rest, which is the simplification a school copybook makes at this stage.

The cursive hand is lowercase only

There are no cursive capitals drawn on this site, which is why the sheet above is called a small letters sheet and why it offers no case to choose. This row of a to z is the whole of the cursive letterform stock. Across the site the print stroke alphabet counts 66 glyphs and the cursive one counts 30. thirty in all: the twenty-six small letters, plus a space, a hyphen, an apostrophe and a full stop

Start dots

A start dot is a mark at the point where a stroke begins. On the alphabet sheet it is one of the controls, and in the drawing described above it is off: the sheet carries 0 start dots. The controls here are script, size, guides, startDots, paper and landscape. There is no words control on this sheet and no fade control; the subject is the alphabet and the row plan is the one set out above.

Sizes, and how the band works

Size steps through the rulings the site draws: Nursery at 12 mm, Infant at 9 mm, Junior at 7 mm and Narrow at 5 mm. Each of those is an x-height, not the depth of the writing band. The band is deeper because it has to hold the ascender loops above the x-height and the descender loops below the baseline, which at Infant makes a 31.5 mm band around a 9 mm x-height. With the alphabet as the subject, the largest ruling that still fits the page is Nursery.

Drawn in the browser, printed in black

The sheet is drawn in the browser from geometry, and the PDF is written in the browser too, from the same geometry. It is offered as PDF, PNG and SVG. Everything on it prints in black: guide lines set in a pale colour vanish on a mono printer, and a sheet with no guide lines is not a ruled sheet.