Print, write, scan

How the sheet is laid out

Every writing cell has the same 5 by 6 shape as the drawing box in the maker, with guide lines at 15%, 40%, 70% and 90% of its height. That matching shape is what lets a scanned cell become a glyph without any guesswork about where the baseline is. The size you pick decides how many cells fit on a page.

Twenty-six lowercase letters at the standard size take one A4 page. Ask for two cells per character and the same alphabet spills onto a second page, because a letter's cells are never split across pages.

Print it at true size

In the print dialog, set scale to 100% and switch headers and footers off. “Fit to page” shrinks the sheet by a few percent, and while the scanner copes with that, your letters end up slightly smaller than the guides suggest. The page size is set from your paper choice, so an A4 sheet prints as A4 and a Letter sheet as Letter. Four black squares mark the corners: the top-left one is bigger, so the scanner always knows which way is up, even if you photograph the page sideways.

A five-minute routine for writing it

1. Use a dark felt-tip or gel pen, 0.7 to 1 mm. Pale pencil and light-coloured ink can fall under the scanner's grey cut-off.
2. Write the first letter, then check the label above its box before you move on. Labels are in the top-left, outside the cell.
3. Sit round letters on the solid line and let tall letters touch the top dashed line.
4. Keep strokes inside the box. A tail that crosses into the next cell is read as belonging to that cell.
5. Let ink dry before you photograph it, and shoot from straight above in daylight.

Mistakes that cost you letters

• Grey pencil

  Looks fine on paper and vanishes at the scanner's threshold.

• Shrunk printing

  Boxes end up 95% size and the baseline moves.

• A cut-off corner

  No mark means no straightening; the scan stops with a message.

• Letters across borders

  Ink beyond the cell is read as the neighbour's.

• Glare from a lamp

  A white hotspot over a box wipes out the strokes under it.

• Scribbled-out mistakes

  A crossed-out attempt is traced along with the real letter. Reprint the page instead.

What the scanner checks

It runs in your browser, in this order. It flattens uneven lighting, finds solid squares and picks the largest as the top-left mark, then warps the page to 8 pixels per millimetre using all four corners, which also corrects tilt and perspective. It counts the page dots, cuts the page into cells using the same layout code that printed the sheet, drops specks, and traces what is left into outlines with the open-source imagetracerjs library. Nothing is uploaded at any step.

What we measured

We tested on pages we generated ourselves: printed to PDF from this page, filled in digitally with a reference alphabet, then re-uploaded. On one A4 page of 26 letters, all 26 landed in the right slot. On a two-page US Letter set with two cells per letter, rendered with a rotated, perspective-skewed, unevenly lit, noisy JPEG, all 26 landed again. These are synthetic pages. A real photo of real pen on real paper will be messier, so expect to use the review grid.

No template? Try a plain page

The Free page tab accepts a photo of letters written on blank paper in lines. It separates the shapes, you type what each line says, and letters are matched in order; stray marks can be excluded with a tap, and a letter drawn in two pieces can be joined. On a generated test page of six lines and 67 letters, every line matched and all 52 resulting glyph slots were correct. It is still marked beta, because it was only tested on clean, digitally made pages. Use the template when accuracy matters.

Template questions