This is a suite of fonts designed for use on primary/elementary school and home school printables. It is roughly built around handwriting, namely a scan of my own, but modified to be somewhat average of today’s native English speakers and writers.
Handfish
Primary school handwriting font suite.
- Partially blotty appearance to highlight start-points of strokes, but otherwise straight yet natural looking lines.
- Uses a 1:1:1 ratio instead of a 1:2:1 to line up with triple ruled paper.
- Has a variant with triple rulings under it!
- Has a traceable variant!!
- Has a variant with stroke order markings!!!
- Has two more a traceable variants with triple ruling and stroke order markings too!!!!
- Superfluous exclamation points!!!!!
- No typewriter (double-storey) “a” nor serifed “G” for modernity and simplicity.
- Small extenders removed from the points where curves meet straight lines atop letters such as “a” to prevent exaggeration of these by students.
- Other penmanship choices not covered above, such as whether “q” has a tail, picked based on results of a quick n’ dirty sample handwriting survey by people from a bunch of countries.
- Big grave accent. This is a feature because it’s not an apostrophe and if you use it as one you should feel bad.
- Most other common punctuation. I wasn’t that lazy.
- Named after a real animal. Because freakish Tasmanian fish with comically oversized hands need love too!
- Free (for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.)
Thanks to those who gave me a handwriting sample over at Waygook.org for your help in deciphering what parts of my own personal style were not quite normal and needed to be rectified. I made this using a pre-compiled version of Fontforge running through Mingwa so enormous thanks to those in the GNU community who have worked so very hard on the project! Brilliant little piece of software. Martin Weber’s autotrace assisted in the scanning process, so cheers to you too!
Please note these are NOT display fonts!
If you try to them on, say, your webpage it will look like rubbish unless it is very, very large (PPT slideshows tend to be large enough intrinsically). Making a display font involves very careful hinting, adjusting of lines to make pixel configurations look good and much, much more. After seeing how many people try to precariously position patterned Comic Sans Word Art over copypasta triple ruled paper JPGs in MS Word… I just wanted a proper printable tracing font suite for student workbooks that wasn’t reminiscent of 1950’s newsprint. If you want a webpage font, there’s a tonne of good display fonts on the internet already. Please consider searching for purchasable ones.
Downloads
Instructions for Use
How to install these fonts:
1. Download the file above.
2. Change the file extension from .doc to .zip. This is unfortunately a workaround due to the limitations of the WordPress platform.
3. Unzip the files. If using an older OS, I’d recommend WinRAR.
4. Close any applications you have running.
5a. For Windows users, drag and drop the files into the C:\WINDOWS\Fonts directory. Note: You must drag and drop the fonts, you cannot save them as a .ttf in the Fonts directory, as it is not a normal directory. Windows performs dark magic on the files during the drag and drop procedure.
5b. For Mac users, drag and drop the fonts into the Fonts folder in the Library folder. If you want to use the fonts on older software, please also drag and drop a copy into the Fonts folder in the Classic System folder.
Feedback
A contact address exists for this project: handfish.font at ye olde gmail dot com.
Handfish Font Suite by P. Evans is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Boxboy English 