Playwrite CA Guides

Austin Norman Palmer worked out a set of cursive letter shapes in the United States, and Henry Boyver MacLean, an educator, took them north. His MacLean’s Method of Writing, from the middle of the 20th century, adjusted Palmer’s letters for the classroom, changed how they were taught and added motor preparation exercises before the writing itself. The MacLean books dropped out of use years ago. The letters did not, and they live on in schoolbooks from regional governments and private publishers across most of Canada’s primary schools.

Playwrite CA is TypeTogether’s font of that model, and the Guides version adds the ruling a child writes on: a baseline, an x-height line and marks for ascenders and descenders, drawn into every glyph so they print with the text. An underscore gives a blank ruled line at word-space width.

There is 1 Regular weight, joined up with contextual alternates, which some apps make you switch on before the letters connect. Veronika Burian and José Scaglione designed it from their Primarium research.