Name tracing sheets

The example held in stock is titled Name tracing, Amelia, 8 lines, Infant, 9mm. It is an A4 page, 210 by 297mm, ruled into eight writing bands at the Infant size of 9mm. As a PDF it runs to 9,831 bytes, and the same sheet is issued as PNG and as SVG.

The name is typed on the page and stays on the page

A name goes into the box and the sheet is set with it. Nothing is sent anywhere. The name is used in the browser that asked for it and never leaves that browser. The drawing is done there and the PDF is written there as well, so the press keeps no record of any name it has set.

A letter the press cannot write is reported, never substituted

The hand drawn here covers the unaccented Latin alphabet, the digits, and a hyphen, an apostrophe and a full stop. In print that is 66 drawn glyphs; there is a cursive hand of 30. A name containing anything outside that set, an accented letter above all, is refused. It is not quietly dropped and it is not flattened to the nearest unaccented neighbour. The reason is plain: taking the accent out of José leaves Jos, which is a different spelling printed on a sheet whose entire purpose was to carry the first one. The press names the letter it cannot write and sets nothing.

“This hand cannot write that character, so the sheet is not set. Nothing is dropped: a name with a letter missing is a different name.”

Too long for the width

A name that will not fit the width of the paper at the size asked for is refused as well, and the refusal carries the largest ruling at which that name would fit. For Amelia on A4 the answer is Nursery, the largest of the four sizes. The rulings are Nursery at 12mm, Infant at 9mm, Junior at 7mm and Narrow at 5mm.

The band, and the air beneath it

Each band is 31.5mm deep and carries four rules: the ascender line, the x-height line beneath it, dashed, then the baseline, then the descender line. The x-height is the whole sheet. A lowercase letter stands one x-height tall and a capital two, so the size in millimetres is the one control that settles everything else on the page. Below the writing the band keeps air, so that a descender never lands on the ascender of the line underneath. Ruling that omits the gap looks tidier and stops working the moment somebody writes a g. The guides control will also drop the band to three of the four rules, or to the baseline on its own.

The fade, and the foot of the page

The eight bands are planned as one model row, two dotted rows to be gone over, and then five empty ruled rows. In strokes that is 36 altogether: 12 in the model row and 24 across the two dotted rows, with 12 start dots marking where each stroke of the model begins. The letters are not set from a typeface. They are drawn from geometry as a stroke alphabet, which is what lets a sheet show a starting point and an order at all. The last five rows carry no letters and are ruled regardless; the page is ruled to its foot whether or not anything is printed on the final lines.

It prints in black

Handwriting paper is conventionally ruled in blue with a red dashed midline. This is not. A sheet whose guide lines vanish on a mono printer is a sheet with no guide lines, so the ruling is black throughout and the x-height line is told apart by being dashed rather than by being coloured. The millimetre size holds only where the printer is set to actual size; scaling to fit the page rescales the ruling along with it.

Controls on this sheet

• Script and text
• Size and rows
• Fade, guides and start dots
• Paper and landscape