Cursive worksheets

The sheet on this page

The sheet is titled Cursive word tracing, 4 words, Infant, 9mm. Its subject is the words the and said you, set in the joined lowercase hand the site draws for cursive. The paper is A4, 210 by 297 mm, and the page carries 8 writing lines. Each line is a band 31.5 mm deep with 4 rules inside it, and the x-height within that band is 9 mm, which is the Infant ruling.

The rows run in a fixed order down the page: a model row first, then two dotted rows to go over, then five ruled rows with nothing in them. That makes 3 written rows and 5 blank ones. Altogether the drawing holds 45 strokes, 15 of them in the model row and 30 in the two dotted rows, with 15 start dots marking where strokes begin. The PDF the browser writes for it comes to 17,579 bytes.

Why the letters join

Every letter in this hand enters at the baseline and leaves at the baseline. That one rule is what makes a joined word possible with no special cases: the exit of one letter lands exactly where the next one begins, so letters set one after another meet on their own. Nothing in the drawing knows about pairs of letters, and there is no table of exceptions anywhere in it.

The cost of that consistency is visible on the sheet. In a formal hand, o, b, v and w finish at x-height and join out along the top. Here they carry their tail down to the baseline like every other letter. That is the simplification a school copybook makes at this stage, and it is a real difference from a copperplate hand. It is stated here rather than left to be noticed.

Cursive letters also carry no tracking. Print letters on this site are set apart from each other so that each one can be gone over on its own; in cursive, a gap opened between two letters is not a wider letter space, it is a broken word. A space between words is a different thing again. It is a lifted pen: an advance along the line with no strokes drawn, and the one place a joined hand stops joining.

The hand is lowercase only

There are no cursive capitals drawn on this site. A cursive sheet is therefore a lowercase sheet, and it offers no case to choose. The words above are set entirely in small letters, and a subject needing a capital belongs on a print sheet.

What the controls change

The controls on this sheet are script, words, size, fade, guides, paper and landscape. 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 figure an x-height rather than a band depth. With the words above, the largest ruling that still fits the page is Nursery. Fade governs the row plan, which is to say how many rows are modelled, how many are dotted and how many are left ruled and empty. Guides turn the rules within each band on and off, and paper and landscape change the sheet the drawing is fitted to. the ascender line at the top, the x-height line 9 millimetres below it, the baseline at 18 and the descender line at 27, with 4.5 millimetres of air beneath

Drawn here, printed in black

The sheet is drawn in the browser and the PDF is written there too, from the same geometry that puts it on screen. The letters are not a typeface and they were not drawn one at a time. They are assembled from movements: the undercurve, the overcurve, the oval, the shoulder, the ascender loop and the descender loop. Letters drawn freehand one after another do not match each other; the same movement, reused, does, so a row is even by construction.

Everything prints in black. A sheet whose guide lines are set in a pale colour is a sheet with no guide lines once a mono printer has had it, so the rules, the dotted rows and the model row are all black. The same drawing is offered as PDF, PNG and SVG. Across the whole site there are 9 sheets, 74 lines and 472 strokes.