Handwriting practice paper

Ruled paper and nothing else. The example held in stock is titled Handwriting paper, 8 lines, Infant, 9mm: an A4 page, 210 by 297mm, carrying eight writing bands at the Infant ruling of 9mm. As a PDF it is 2,717 bytes, the lightest of the three paper sheets, and the same sheet comes as PNG and as SVG. The ruling is drawn by the site rather than lifted from a stored master, so the same eight-band page can be reissued at another size without a second original.

The x-height is the whole sheet

One measurement settles a ruled page, and that is the x-height. Here it is 9mm. A lowercase letter stands one x-height tall and a capital two, so the band that holds them is 31.5mm deep, being three x-heights of writing with air kept beneath. A different millimetre size moves every line on the page with it. The four rulings are:

• Nursery, 12mm
• Infant, 9mm
• Junior, 7mm
• Narrow, 5mm

Four writing lines

Each band is ruled with four lines: the ascender line at the top, the x-height line below it, dashed, then the baseline, then the descender line. That is the full ruling. The guides control also offers three of the four, or the baseline on its own for paper that is meant to look plainer.

The air beneath the band

A band is not simply stacked against the next one. It keeps air below the descender line, so that a descender never comes down on the ascender of the line underneath. Ruling that leaves the gap out looks neater on screen and becomes unusable the moment somebody writes a g. Eight bands of 31.5mm, gap included, is what this page holds at this size.

4.5 millimetres

Ruled to the foot

All eight rows on this sheet are empty. On the sheets that do carry letters the ruling still runs down to the last line whether or not anything is printed on it, because a page that stops ruling where the model stops is a page with a bare corner. Of the 472 strokes drawn across the nine sheets on the site, none are on this one. It contributes 8 of the 74 ruled lines and no letters at all.

Fewer controls, because nothing is written

This sheet has four controls: size, guides, paper and landscape. There is no rows control, no fade and no start dots, since those three govern written rows and this sheet has none.

Black ink, and true size

Handwriting paper is conventionally ruled in blue with a red dashed midline. This is ruled in black. A sheet whose guide lines disappear on a mono printer is a sheet without guide lines, so the x-height line is distinguished by being dashed and not by colour. Under the surface the PDF is written in points: a page of 595.28 by 841.89 points, a unit of 25.51 and a band of 89.29. Those figures are fixed on the page, but the millimetre size only survives to paper where the printer prints at actual size. Scaling to fit rescales the ruling with everything else, and the sheet that comes out is no longer ruled at 9mm whatever its title says.