Cursive practice sheets

The sheet on this page

The sheet set here is Cursive word tracing, 2 words, Junior, 7mm, and its subject is the two words practice writing. The paper is A4, 210 by 297 mm. The x-height is 7 mm, which is the Junior ruling, and each writing band is 24.5 mm deep with 4 rules inside it. Ten of those bands fit down the page, so the sheet has 10 lines.

The rows go in order: a model row, two dotted rows to go over, then seven ruled rows left empty. That is 3 written rows and 7 blank ones. The drawing holds 60 strokes in all, 20 of them in the model row and 40 in the dotted rows, with 20 start dots marking where strokes begin. The PDF the browser writes is 19,922 bytes.

A smaller ruling puts more lines on the page

Junior is the 7 mm ruling. The site also draws Nursery at 12 mm, Infant at 9 mm and Narrow at 5 mm, and every one of those figures is an x-height rather than the depth of the band. The band is always taller than the x-height, because it has to hold the ascender loops above and the descender loops below. At Infant, a sheet of this kind has a 31.5 mm band and 8 lines. At Junior here the band is 24.5 mm and there are 10. With these two words as the subject, the largest ruling that still fits is Nursery.

Where a joined hand stops joining

Every letter in this hand enters at the baseline and leaves at the baseline, so setting one letter after another is all the joining there is. The exit of one lands exactly where the next begins. There is one deliberate break in that on this sheet: the gap between practice and writing. A space is a lifted pen. The drawing advances along the line and puts down no strokes, and the next word starts at the baseline as any letter does.

Cursive letters carry no tracking. The print sheets on this site hold letters apart from each other so that each can be gone over on its own, but a gap opened between two cursive letters is not a wider letter space, it is a broken word. The letters here sit touching by construction, and the only gap along the line is the one the space puts there.

The tails on o, b, v and w

In a formal hand, o, b, v and w finish at x-height and join out along the top. This hand does not do that. Those letters carry their tail down to the baseline like the rest, which is the simplification a school copybook makes at this stage. It is what leaves the joins with no special cases in them, and it is also what makes this something other than a copperplate hand. The sheets say so rather than leaving it to be found on the page.

Lowercase only

There are no cursive capitals drawn on this site. A cursive sheet is a lowercase sheet, and there is no case control on it to change that. The two words above are set entirely in small letters, and a subject needing a capital is a print sheet.

The fade, the controls and the ink

The fade is the row plan: a solid model row, dotted rows over it, then ruled rows with nothing in them, in that order down the page. The controls on this sheet are script, words, size, fade, guides, paper and landscape. Guides turn the rules inside each band on and off; paper and landscape change the sheet the drawing is fitted to. The words control takes any words typed into it, so the sheet is set with whatever is put in front of it. The model row and the dotted rows are both drawn at 0.52 millimetres

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