Preschool letter tracing sheets

The sheet drawn on this page is titled Letter tracing, a, Nursery, 12mm. The subject is the small letter a on its own, on one side of A4, 210 by 297 millimetres, ruled into six writing lines. It is drawn in the browser when it is asked for, and the PDF is written in the browser too. Nothing is uploaded and no template is hosted.

Set at the largest ruling

The x-height, the height of a small letter carrying no ascender or descender, is 12 millimetres here. That is the largest ruling on the list: nursery at 12 millimetres, infant at 9, junior at 7 and narrow at 5. A small letter stands one x-height tall and a capital two, so the writing band, three x-heights of writing with air beneath, comes to 42 millimetres. A band that deep leaves room for six of them on the page, where a smaller ruling would fit more.

The names are labels attached to millimetre values and nothing more. This press states the measurement it sets and leaves it at that; it makes no claim about which size suits whom, and knows nothing about the person the sheet is printed for.

The four rules

Each band is ruled with four lines: the ascender line at the top, the x-height line, the baseline the letters sit on, and the descender line below it. The letter a reaches neither the ascender line nor the descender line, and both are ruled regardless, because the band is the band. The guides control drops the ruling to three lines, or to the baseline on its own.

How the rows fade

• Row one is a model, drawn solid: 16 strokes.
• Rows two and three are dotted, to be gone over: 32 strokes.
• Rows four, five and six are ruled and empty.

The letter is set eight times in each written row, and the sheet carries 48 strokes altogether, along with two start dots. Three rows have writing on them and three do not, and the page is ruled to its foot either way. Quite how much paper is left below the last line is 14 millimetres at every edge

Black, with a dashed midline

Handwriting paper is conventionally blue with a red dashed line at the x-height. These sheets print in black, since a coloured guide line on a mono printer can arrive as no line at all, and the x-height line is set apart by being dashed instead. That distinction survives whatever the sheet is printed on.

Paths, not outlines

The letters are drawn from geometry as stroke alphabets: the path the pen travels, rather than the outline the ink fills. An outline traced is a letter drawn twice, once down each side. Because these are paths, the sheet marks where each stroke begins with a dot, and numbers the strokes when a letter takes more than one. A typeface has no first stroke and no direction and can mark neither.

What it will not set

A ruling too small to write in is refused, and so is a subject too wide for the paper. With a on A4 the largest ruling that fits is the nursery size, 12 millimetres, which is the size this sheet is already set at. Across the nine sheets on the site there are 74 ruled lines and 472 strokes in total.

Formats are PDF, PNG and SVG, and this PDF is 9,900 bytes. The 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.