Playwrite CL Guides

Type an underscore in Playwrite CL Guides and no letter comes out, only the ruled lines: baseline, x-height, ascender and descender, stretched to the width of a word space. Hold the key down and you have an empty practice row for a child to fill in with a pencil. TypeTogether put that in for teachers, so a worksheet can be built without drawing a single rule by hand.

Every other letter sits on the same set of guides. The letters themselves follow the Chilean school model, letra ligada, the joined cursive that children in Chile start on at around 6, either beside print letters or by itself. It stands upright. You could call it English roundhand with the slant taken out, though Chilean designers point to real differences from that older hand, with shorter ascenders and descenders and capitals that carry less ornament.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione drew it as part of Playwrite, the school fonts that grew out of Primarium’s survey of how handwriting is taught country by country. In menus it is listed as Playwrite CL Guides, a single Regular weight with no bold or italic, and the letters join through contextual alternates. In Microsoft Word those have to be switched on under the Advanced font settings before the cursive connects, so do that before printing a class set.