Introducing Hanzi Grids - A tool for creating printable worksheets for handwriting practice

[imron]

One of several things I've been working on lately is Hanzi Grids - an online tool for generating custom grid-paper templates that you can print out and use for Chinese handwriting practice.

I know, I know, it's the age of computers, and who actually physically writes anything in Chinese these days, blah blah blah, but some people do like to write things, and even people who don't still need to write things occasionally, and when they do, they'd probably prefer that their handwriting didn't look like it was written by a 7-year old. After all, you might know how to write a whole bunch of characters, but if you haven't spent the time practising getting correctly proportioned characters to fit in little square boxes, then it all amounts to nought when you're trying to fill in that form at the post office or the bank.

And so this is a tool for the type of person who likes to practise writing, to make it easy for them to create practice grids, because getting grids to practise with isn't always so easy. Sure, if you're in China, you can wander down to your local bookstore and pick up any number of 字帖 or workbooks with nicely sized grids, but not everyone has that luxury, and while it's certainly possible to create grids yourself in Excel or similar, Hanzi Grids takes most of the effort out of it and also allows you to adjust and preview changes to everything in real-time (assuming you're using a modern browser that has a decent Javascript engine - IE6 users, you're out of luck!).

Basic features of the grids that you can set include:

*Text content - supports traditional and simplified characters or a mix of both, as well as rare and uncommon characters.

*Repeated characters per row, or a single block of continuous text.

*Cell size

*Row and column spacing

*Font size within the cell

*Guidelines for each cell

*Dimming levels for both characters and guides

*Mixture of dimmed/non-dimmed characters

*Page size/layout (A4/Letter, portrait/landscape).

*Page headings

And when you're done, click a button and it all gets saved as a PDF file.

It's pretty simple to operate, just type in whatever characters you want (or leave that field blank), then adjust the various sliders so the grid has the size/layout you like. Then just click 'Generate PDF' to create a PDF file which you can download and then print out whenever you need to practice your handwriting.

Sure, it's no substitute to say practising with transparencies of 王羲之, but if you're just looking to develop handwriting that is neat and proportional it's certainly of use.

There are still a number of features I plan to add, including:

*The ability to upload and save both content and layouts to simply future creation of grids,

*Automatically providing pronunciation and translations of characters in the grid,

*The ability to change fonts (this will also make it useful for Japanese/Korean, which currently work fine except for the font),

*The ability to change the colour of the grid, text, and guides,

*Different guide styles (diagonal etc),

*More advanced grid styles (rather than just the current uniform rows/columns),

*Possibly stroke order guides (but this would still be a long way off).

*A whole bunch of other little things that I'm not going to list out individually just now.

Anyway, despite currently missing the above features it's basically in a usable state now, and so I thought I'd put it out there for people to play with, rather than waiting until everything was done (plus, being a new site, there may still be a few problems, and if you encounter any, I'd love to hear about them so I can get them fixed!).

So, if you're interested, check it out at: http://www.hanzigrids.com/ and let me know what you think.

[imron]

plus, being a new site, there may still be a few problems

*sigh* speaking of which, just discovered and fixed a problem with generating pdfs from empty grids.

[rezaf]

It's good but I hope you can add a 行書 font which would be more useful for handwriting practice.

[imron]

Yes, I would love to do that. Unfortunately licensing such a font for embedding in PDF files costs hundreds or possibly even thousands of dollars (depending on the font) and although it's possible to create PDFs with non-embedded fonts, I'm currently running into a few problems doing that. Hopefully that will be resolved before too long and font selection will be possible.

In any case, you can still print out blank grids for your own 行书 practice.

[querido]

It looks great!

[imron]

Thanks!

[ascold]

Thank you very much. Its a great tool.

[liuzhou]

Impressive and useful. Well done!

[Olle Linge]

I just registered and tried it out. Seems to work well, I love the UI! I'll be sure to share this. Thanks!

[markwong]

cool, thanks for sharing!

[Don_Horhe]

Amazing tool, thanks!

[realmayo]

Looks very good and I will start using it immediately. Thank you!

I'd love to hear about them so I can get them fixed

When I switch from portrait to landscape the "visible characters" bar doesn't extend correspondingly to fill the empty spaces, though perhaps this is intentional.

[Daan]

Nice! I just registered, but when I'd confirmed my account and tried to log in, I got an error saying my password was wrong. I'm quite sure I didn't get my password wrong, but I hit "reset" all the same. I reset my password and then a page appeared inviting me to log in again, but when I did so, I got another error message saying that particular link had expired. (This was within the website, not from my browser.) Now, when I go to http://www.hanzigrids.com/login, I still can't log in using the same username and password. Anything you can do?

[Demonic_Duck]

Nice! I just registered, but when I'd confirmed my account and tried to log in, I got an error saying my password was wrong. I'm quite sure I didn't get my password wrong, but I hit "reset" all the same. I reset my password and then a page appeared inviting me to log in again, but when I did so, I got another error message saying that particular link had expired. (This was within the website, not from my browser.) Now, when I go to[/font]http://www.hanzigrids.com/login, I still can't log in using the same username and password. Anything you can do?

When I logged in for the first time, my browser automatically set the "username" to my email address. You have to enter the actual username you signed up with in that field. (Hope that helps.)

[Daan]

Hit the nail right on the head, thanks Imron, I'm using Google Chrome (16.0.1), but I'm guessing there will be other browsers that do this by default as long as you don't turn off autocompletion. But then you may not necessarily want to turn that feature off...

[imron]

Hi everyone, thanks for the feedback.

I'll make it so that either username or email will work for logging-in in a future version. That should hopefully sort things out.

Regarding the "visible characters" bar, I wasn't really sure of the best way to handle this. Basically I decided to go with keeping things set at the actual number the user had configured regardless of changes in layout/number of columns, rather than try to always use the same relative proportions of visible/dimmed/invisible. The problem with the proportional approach is if you change the grid size to be really large (e.g. only 4 columns), you lose that fidelity, and then when you shrink it back down again you'd have a larger number of characters visible than perhaps you wanted. That was my major reasoning to making sure they stay at their fixed value (unless a reduction in columns forces the number to reduce).

I'm sure I could probably come up with some tricky logic to make sure it worked more intuitively, and may do that in a future version if anyone has some good suggestions on what the preferred behaviour should be.

[imron]

Also another quick tip. The more recent your browser, the faster Hanzi Grids will run. Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8.0 are probably about as low as you can go and still be reasonably usable (albeit a bit sluggish). Any of the more recent versions of Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Opera will run it quite snappily - but Opera has really poor handling of Chinese fonts, so what you see in the browser window might not reflect what you see in the generated PDF.

[roddy]

Good stuff.

To be honest it seems to me that someone is more likely to say ' I want to trace 4 times then write it myself' than 'I want to trace is 25% of times, then write it myself.

[imron]

They could also just as easily think, I want to trace it most of the time except for the last few.

[Ludens]

Seems really useful, thanks! Is there any particular reason though for the need to register? Most of the time I don't bother with sites I can't use right away without giving my e-mail address, and I guess I'm not the only one.