About Handwriting Guide

Handwriting Guide wasn't planned as a website. It started with one font and one recipe book.

It started with a font

I fell in love with a Google font called Grand Hotel: a looping, slightly retro script with the kind of easy confidence I wished my own handwriting had. I was putting together a handwritten recipe book at the time, and I wanted the recipes to look like that.

So I started practising the low-tech way. I typed text in Google Docs, set it to light grey, printed it and traced over it with a pen. It worked, sort of. But solid grey letters don't teach you much: you just follow the outline without really learning where each stroke starts, which way it moves, and where the pen lifts. What I actually wanted was dotted tracing, the kind of sheet children learn their first letters from, only in the font I wanted to learn.

Nothing I could find did that for an arbitrary Google font. So I built it myself.

From a tool for me to a tool for anyone

The first version of the generator did one thing: take a Google font, turn text into dotted tracing lines and print it. Because it worked with any Google font, it was just as useful for the next font I wanted to learn, and then the next.

I shared it on Reddit, and friends with young children started printing sheets for their kids. The feedback from both has shaped almost everything that came after: guide lines and slant lines, different tracing styles, cursive joins, paper sizes, ready-made worksheets for people who just want to print something, and guides on the parts of handwriting that practice sheets alone can't teach.

Reddit taught me a lot in another way, too. I've spent many hours reading bullet journaling communities, where people share honestly what worked for them and what didn't: which pens bleed, which lettering styles survive a busy week, why a practice routine falls apart after day four. A lot of that collective experience has found its way into the site.

If you want to see where it all began, here is Grand Hotel as a dotted alphabet sheet.

A lifelong love of writing systems

The other half of this site comes from somewhere older. I've always been fascinated by how differently people write. I learned to read and write Arabic script as a child, and over the years added Urdu, Hindi (Devanagari), Cyrillic, Greek and Japanese hiragana. Every new script is a small puzzle: new shapes, new stroke orders, sometimes a new direction on the page. It's still one of my favourite things to learn.

So when the generator grew up, teaching it other scripts felt natural. It now makes practice sheets for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Devanagari, Japanese kana, Korean hangul, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew, with right-to-left rows, joined letters and transliteration labels in the margin. These are the sheets I wish I'd had when I was learning.

How the site works

• One person makes it. I write the code, the guides and the worksheets myself. When the site says "we", it's really me.
• The generator is free, with no account needed. An account is only for saving your designs.
• I'm a learner, not a certified handwriting teacher. The guides draw on my own practice, on feedback from the people who use the sheets, and on what other learners have shared about what works. Where something is a matter of opinion, I try to say so.

Say hello

I read every message. If you have an idea for a worksheet, a script you'd like to see, or you've found something that doesn't work, please get in touch.