Soon after I launched my School Cursive font, I received feedback from buyers that the font doesn't work in Microsoft Powerpoint. That's a big drawback, because many teachers use Powerpoint to create lesson materials.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a limitation in Powerpoint, and all fonts that use advanced OpenType features suffer from this. So initially, I thought there was nothing I could do about it.

Letter formation is the ability to create correct, recognizable letters.

Two important parts of letter formation are:

In my previous article I discussed what makes creating a cursive font hard. In this article I will look at less and more successful solutions that have been invented by font designers to solve the problem of cursive.

Why is it so difficult to create (or find) a good cursive computer font? Why do computer fonts so often look different from the handwriting we want to teach our students?  It has to do with the dynamic, flexible nature of cursive. Letters adapt to their surrounding letters.

I few days ago I quietly launched my font School Cursive on TeachersPayTeachers.com.

My main reason for creating a font commercially is that I wanted to motivate myself to keep going until I had a finished product, and to stay on track with creating sometimes other people need rather than get sidetracked by whatever technical challenge seems novel and interesting.

Outline letters have a lot of uses in the classroom. But you don't need to buy outline fonts to create outline letters. You can use Microsoft Word to convert any letter or piece of text into its outline.

Why do I create tools for teaching cursive?

Because there are not enough good quality tools for teaching cursive yet.

In fact, since I've started creating materials and (later) tools for teaching cursive, I've started to notice how poor the quality is of most of what is available on the Internet.

So the simple answer is: I create tools because I can. Because I can do better.

 

So do I think everybody should learn cursive?