Playwrite PT Guides

Portugal leaves the method of teaching handwriting to each school, within the curriculum goals the government sets and the outside evaluations that check them, and the schools do not all agree. Systematic teaching starts in the 1st Cycle. Most begin with letra impressa, print letters, capitals first, for children of 5 or 6, and only later move to escrita vertical, a fully joined upright cursive. A few traditional schools skip the print stage and go to letra de mão, cursive, from day 1.

This font is for the second stage, and for the page a child copies it onto. Each glyph comes with ruling drawn behind it, a baseline, a line for the x-height and lines for ascenders and descenders, so a printed word sits on the same lines the child is asked to write on. Type an underscore and you get the ruling alone, as wide as a space.

There is 1 Regular weight. Joining depends on contextual alternates, which Word keeps under Format, Font, Advanced. It is 1 of TypeTogether’s Playwrite school fonts by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, which grew out of their Primarium research into handwriting models.