Free School Handwriting Fonts and How to Install Them

Playwrite, a type family built for teaching

Playwrite is a large family of handwriting fonts designed by the type foundry TypeTogether, led by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, and published on Google Fonts. Instead of one generic script, it offers a separate font for each national or regional school style, drawn after studying how children in that place are taught to write. The family covers dozens of countries, from Argentina to Vietnam, and the English-speaking ones are listed below.

Each font is a variable font with a weight axis running from Thin to Regular, so you can make the strokes lighter for tracing or darker for a model line. The letters join through a font feature called contextual alternates: the shape of each letter changes slightly depending on its neighbors, which is how a typed word ends up looking connected rather than like a row of separate cursive letters.

Because the fonts are meant for schools, they look plain on purpose. There are no flourishes, and the joins follow the rules of each style, so a Victorian font joins differently from an English one.

The English-language school styles in the family

The names follow a pattern: Playwrite, then a country code, then a short label for the region or variant. The descriptions in the table are short summaries of how each font looks, not a claim that it matches any department's model letter for letter. Check a few letters against your school's chart before you build a whole term of sheets on one font.

The two English fonts also come in a sloped italic version, and every family has a matching Guides version with ruled lines drawn into the letters, which is covered further down.

What the SIL Open Font License lets you do

Playwrite is released under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1, usually shortened to OFL. It is free for personal and commercial use. You can install it on every computer in a school, type worksheets with it, print them, share PDFs, and sell worksheets or books you made with it. The font can be embedded in documents and PDFs, and it can be used on websites.

The license has a few limits. You may not sell the font files on their own, and if you modify the font and share your version, the modified font must stay under the same license. The Playwrite fonts do not carry a Reserved Font Name, so even a modified copy may keep the Playwrite name, but most people will never need to think about that.

This is very different from many commercial school fonts, whose licenses can limit the number of computers or forbid embedding. If you already own one of those, read its license before putting it in a shared document. We do not offer downloads of commercial fonts.

Installing a font on Windows or a Mac

Start on Google Fonts, search for Playwrite and open the family you need, for example Playwrite AU NSW. Use the button to get the font and download the family as a zip file. Inside you will find a variable font file and, usually, a folder of static files with fixed weights. Either works; the static Regular file is the simplest choice for word processors.

On Windows, unzip the folder first, then right-click the font file and choose Install, or Install for all users if several people share the computer. You can also drag font files onto the Fonts page in Settings. Close and reopen Word or any other program that was running, because most programs read the font list only when they start.

On a Mac, double-click the font file to open it in Font Book and click Install. The font becomes available to Pages, Word and most other apps after a restart of the app. On a school-managed device you may need an administrator to install fonts for you.

Using the font in Word and Google Docs

In Word, select your text and pick the font by name from the font list. If cursive letters appear but do not join, open the Font dialog, go to the Advanced tab and make sure contextual alternates are switched on; that is the feature Playwrite uses for its joins. Set a large size, often 28 to 48 points for young children, and increase the line spacing so letters do not touch the line above. Playwrite has no bold or italic in Word or Google Docs, apart from the true italic of the two English families, so the B and I buttons only fake them; leave them off.

If you send the file to someone who has not installed the font, Word will substitute another one. Word for Windows can embed fonts in the file through its save options, and exporting to PDF avoids the problem entirely, since the PDF carries the font with it.

Google Docs needs no installation at all. Open the font menu, choose More fonts, search for Playwrite and tick the families you want; they then appear in the font menu for every document in your account. Anyone who opens the shared document sees the same letters, because Google Docs loads the font from Google Fonts.

Why a font alone does not make a tracing sheet

A font gives you letter shapes, and that is all. It does not draw the top line, midline and baseline children write between, and it cannot tell a child where to start a letter or which way to move the pencil. Typed text in a word processor also sits on line spacing that has nothing to do with the letter's x-height, so the letters rarely sit neatly in ruled rows.

Many dotted tracing fonts break the outline into dots, so the child traces around the edge of a letter rather than down the middle of its stroke. Our school-style font sheets share that limit; only our print styles trace the middle of the stroke. The Guides versions of Playwrite draw guide lines into each letter, which helps, yet the lines change with the font size and there is still no starting point or direction.

This is why our generators handle the layout themselves. The country style sheets, such as the Queensland Beginners style sheets and the South Australian style sheets, set the Playwrite letters on guide lines that follow the font's own x-height and trace them as a dashed outline, with rows that fade and empty rows to write alone. The fonts on our sheets include accented letters, macrons and œ, but they carry no stroke arrows, so those sheets have none. For arrows, start dots and numbered strokes, the print styles in the main handwriting worksheet generator draw each letter from our own stroke data instead of a font.

Fonts sold under the names of school styles

Search for an Australian state style and you will find fonts for sale that carry the style's name. These are commercial products made by third parties; a state education department designs a handwriting style, not usually a font file. Some schools have licensed one of them, and if yours has, using the school's copy keeps everything consistent.

If you are buying for yourself, compare a few letters of the free Playwrite font against your school's alphabet chart first. For many families and tutors, the free font, or a ready-made sheet such as the word tracing worksheets or blank handwriting paper, is all they need. For how the styles themselves differ, see school handwriting styles by country.