>robinlinacre

Originally posted: 2026-04-19. View source code for this page here.

Letterpaths - free software for teaching cursive writing

I have developed a free and open source library called letterpaths, to help my kids with their handwriting.

I noticed a lack of free, high quality tools that follow the UK curriculum and I wanted something flexible that could be used both in games and for worksheet generation.

What does letterpaths do?

letterpaths understands step-by-step letter formation and how to join letters, covering print, pre-cursive and cursive.

This enables several key features:

  • Tracing: Apps where the user pulls a guide along the path, to get a feel for the order of strokes
  • Animated letter formation. Apps that show step by step how letters and word are formed.
  • Worksheet generation: Letters and words can be annotated into their consitituent strokes, with arrows and numbered points.
  • Tracing by hand: Apps where the user draws (using a stylus or their finger) along the path. See the letter constellations game.

This is easier to show than to describe. I have chosen the word excite because it’s quite tricky: it contains deferred pen-up events (on the x and t) and deferred marks (dotted i, crossed t).

Here are a few examples using the word excite:

Worksheet generation

The worksheet generator allows you to customise annotations to your taste:

Annotated excite word showing stroke order, arrows, and numbered points
Worksheet generator - annotations outside letters
Annotated excite word showing directional arrows along the full path
Worksheet generator - bidirection annotations within letters

Games and tracing

I have developed two demo games and a basic pedagogical tracing app:

Plain formation
Snake game
Rollercoaster game (dragged by hand)

Use letterpaths to create your own apps

The above apps are all powered by the underlying letterpaths library, available on npm.

As a result, you can build your own apps on top of letterpaths too. Nowadays, with agentic AI coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, this is much easier than it used to be.

Since I have released the source code under a permissive open source license, these apps are guaranteed to be free forever.

Give me feedback

I am not a teacher, and I would welcome feedback on how to improve these apps, particularly from those with experience teaching handwriting.

Some forthcoming features I already have in mind:

  • Improving support for print letters, and a print and pre-cursive worksheet generator
  • Allowing the user to choose letter vairants (e.g. there are different ways to form the letter x and f)
  • Improve the geometry of each letter to make hte handwriting neater