How these letters are made

Letter shapes

Every large letter, step diagram and practice sheet is drawn from the vector outlines inside the font file of Playwrite US Trad, the United States "traditional" member of the Playwrite family, a set of school-handwriting typefaces made by TypeTogether for Google Fonts. The outline is read at build time and turned directly into the picture you see, with no redrawing, so the shapes are exact and the same across pages. The pictures are generated from the font, not photographs and not AI images.

The handwriting lines use the font's own proportions: the baseline, the midline at the height of short letters (500 units of 1,000) and the top line at the height of capitals (1,000 units). The measurements in each page's size table are read from the same outlines.

Pen paths

A typeface stores the outline of a letter, not the order in which a hand writes it. So for each letter we trace, once and by hand, a center line through the middle of the stroke in the direction the pen travels. That line drives the animation and the step pictures.

A hand-traced line can be careless, so no letter is published until its line passes two geometric checks against the outline:

• every point along the line, taken every 4 font units, has to fall inside the letter's ink;
• a pen of radius 60 units moved along the line has to cover at least 95% of the letter's ink, measured on a 8-unit grid.

A line shifted sideways, a line that stops halfway, or the line of a different letter all fail these checks; the site will not build with such a line in it.

Stroke descriptions

The words that describe where a letter starts and which way the pen moves come from published handwriting manuals and teaching guides, quoted on the letter's page with a link to the original. When we have no such source for a letter, its page shows the letter and the practice sheet but leaves out the step-by-step description.

Typefaces and licenses

The fonts are served unmodified from this site. The letter pictures are drawings made with Playwrite US Trad; the font software itself is not sold or renamed.