LaTeX Handwriting Practice Worksheets

Having never quite been able to write $\zeta$ or $\xi$ correctly, I cobbled together some code to generate worksheets to help practice my handwriting. Since a few people have expressed interest in them, I thought I’d share the documents and code here!

The idea is fairly simple: you toss in a bunch of symbols you want to practice writing, and it generates a grade-school-style worksheet with the symbols sketched out in dotted lines:

You can then either print this out and write over the symbols with any real-life writing implement, or just import them into your favorite PDF annotation software and practice using a stylus.

If you just want to take a direct look, here is a sample PDF and here is raw tex code.

The code is fairly simple:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{dashrule}
\usepackage{pgf, pgffor}
\usepackage{amsfonts}

\newsavebox\myboxX
\newsavebox\myboxx
\newdimen\heightX
\newdimen\heightx

\newcommand{\setline}[2]{%
    \savebox\myboxX{\scalebox{#1}{X}}%
    \savebox\myboxx{\scalebox{#1}{x}}%
    \heightX=\ht\myboxX
    \heightx=\ht\myboxx
    \noindent\ooalign{\rule[\heightX]{\textwidth}{.1pt}\cr
    \noindent\hdashrule[\heightx]{\textwidth}{.1pt}{1mm}\cr
    \noindent\rule{\textwidth}{.1pt}\cr
    \noindent\scalebox{#1}{\pdfliteral{q 1 Tr [.1 .2]0 d .1 w}#2\pdfliteral{Q}}}%
}

\begin{document}

\foreach \n in {
  \zeta, \eta,
  \kappa, \nu, \xi, \rho, \sigma,
  \tau, \phi, \varphi, \chi, \psi, \omega,
  \mathfrak{g}, \mathfrak{h}, \mathfrak{n},
  \mathfrak{b}, \mathfrak{z}, \mathfrak{s},
  \mathfrak{l}, \mathfrak{p},
  \Phi
}{
\foreach \j in {1, 2, ..., 10}{
  \setline{5}{$\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n$}\vspace{0.25cm}\\
}
}

\end{document}

You can swap out anything appearing in the foreach section for whatever symbols you’d like to practice. So far, it has seemed to work with just about everything I’ve thrown at it, so give it a try!

If you have any ideas for improvements or generate cool worksheets, let me know and I’d be more than happy to link and share them here!

Note that there is a slight caveat: each symbol is printed with a wide interior region, which can make tracing with fine-tipped pens difficult. I don’t currently know a way around this.