Playwrite ZA Guides

Type an underscore in Playwrite ZA Guides and you get no letter at all, only the ruled lines, as wide as a word space. The trick is for teachers making practice sheets: a row of underscores prints empty guidelines for a child to fill in by hand.

Every other character carries its guides with it, baseline, x-height, ascender and descender lines, so each letter sits inside the frame a child is learning to copy. It is the companion to Playwrite South Africa, from Veronika Burian and José Scaglione at TypeTogether, and follows that font’s model.

South Africa’s curriculum document, CAPS, lays out the steps (motor skills in Grade R, unjoined capitals and lowercase in Grade 1, speed in Grade 2, then cursive) and never names a handwriting model. Teachers and publishers settled on their own. Ball and stick letters come first, a steeply slanted continuous cursive after.

Like its siblings it comes out of the Primarium research. This guided cut has a single Regular with Vietnamese in its 486 characters, plus 9 stylistic sets. In Microsoft Word, switch on Contextual Alternates in the font settings, or the letters will not behave.