Letter tracing sheets

The sheet drawn on this page is titled Letter tracing, Aa, Infant, 9mm. It is one side of A4, 210 by 297 millimetres, ruled into eight writing lines, with the capital and the small letter set together as the subject. It is drawn in the browser at the moment it is asked for, and the PDF is written there as well. Nothing is uploaded and no template is fetched from anywhere else.

The x-height is the whole sheet

A copybook page is measured from one number: the x-height, the height of a small letter that carries neither an ascender nor a descender. On this sheet it is 9 millimetres, the ruling named Infant in the list of sizes. A small letter stands one x-height tall and a capital stands two. The writing band, three x-heights of writing with air beneath it, comes to 31.5 millimetres, and eight of those bands fill the page.

Every other measurement follows from that one, which is why the size in millimetres is the single control that matters. A sheet scaled by the printer is no longer the ruling named on it. The lines still look like ruled lines, but they are not 9 millimetres any more, and a sheet that arrives at a ruling nobody asked for is a sheet with the wrong ruling on it. Printed at full size, with no fit-to-page, the measurement survives the journey to paper.

Four rules to a band

Each band carries four rules: the ascender line at the top, the x-height line, the baseline the letters sit on, and the descender line beneath. Three of them are solid and the x-height line is dashed. The guides control cuts the band back to three lines, or to the baseline on its own.

The fade is the lesson

• The first row is a model, drawn solid: 30 strokes.
• The next two rows are dotted, to be gone over: 60 strokes.
• The last five rows are ruled and empty.

Three of the eight rows carry writing and five do not. Aa is set six times in every written row, which makes 90 strokes on the sheet in all. Five start dots are printed. The page is ruled to its foot whether or not letters appear on the last lines: those empty rows are not spare paper, they are what the ruling exists for.

Black ink and a dashed midline

Handwriting paper is conventionally ruled in blue with a red dashed line at the x-height. This sheet is drawn in black instead, because a pale coloured guide line sent to a mono printer is a guide line that arrives as nothing at all. The x-height line is marked out by being dashed rather than by being red, and a dash survives any printer.

Stroke alphabets, not a typeface

The letters are not set in a font. They are stroke alphabets, drawn from geometry as the paths a pen takes. The difference shows in what the sheet is able to mark: a start dot where each stroke begins, and a number on the strokes when a letter takes more than one. A typeface can mark neither, because it has no first stroke and no direction. It describes the outline the ink fills, so going over a printed typeface means drawing every letter twice, once down each side.

What it will not set

Some requests are refused. One is a subject too wide for the paper: with Aa on A4, the largest ruling that still fits is the nursery size, 12 millimetres. The other is a ruling too small to write in, though the floor in millimetres is 4 millimetres

The sheet comes as PDF, PNG or SVG, and the PDF of this one is 13,313 bytes. Its controls are the script, the letter, the letter case, the size, the number of rows, the fade, the guides, the start dots, the paper and landscape.