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About this tool
Build a printable name tracing sheet for a preschooler — four line ruling, dotted or grey letters, sized to a real x-height in millimetres.
The Name Tracing Worksheet Generator turns a child's name into a printable practice sheet with four-line guides, a solid model to copy and dotted repetitions to trace. Letters are sized by x-height in millimetres rather than by point size, using the standard 0.52 em x-height ratio, so a 12 mm setting produces letters that really measure 12 mm from baseline to waist line on paper. It works out how many repetitions fit across the writing width and how many rows fit down the page, so nothing runs off the sheet.
Open Name Tracing Worksheet Generator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Type the Child's name — letters, spaces, hyphens and apostrophes, up to 24 characters — and set 'Letter x-height (mm)' anywhere from 4 to 40.
Choose Letter case (Title Case, UPPERCASE or lowercase), Tracing style (Dotted outline, Solid outline, Grey letters, or First solid, rest dotted), Page size (A4 210 x 297 mm, A5 148 x 210 mm or US Letter) and Margin (mm), and tick 'Print the four-line guides behind the letters'.
Check 'Tracings on the sheet' with its rows x per row split, x-height, Four-line band height and Row pitch, then press Print at 100% scale with fit-to-page off so the letters measure the x-height shown.
Set the x-height you actually want on paper instead of guessing at a point size.
The first tracing on each row is solid so the child sees the shape before copying it.
Repetitions per row and rows per page are calculated, and long names are flagged with the largest size that fits.
For a three or four year old, an x-height of about 15–20 mm suits developing fine motor control; by five or six, 10–12 mm is comfortable, and school four-line copies are often around 8–10 mm. Start larger and reduce as control improves.
Most early-years programmes start with the capital initial and lower-case rest — Aarav rather than AARAV — because it is the form the child will write for the rest of their life. All-capitals is sometimes used first because the shapes are simpler, but it is worth moving on early.
The sheet uses whichever child-friendly font is installed on the device, so letterforms vary between machines. Check the preview before printing a class set, particularly for the letters a and g, which are drawn differently in single-storey and double-storey fonts.
Set the printer scale to 100% and turn off “fit to page”, then measure a lower-case letter with a ruler from the baseline to the top of the x. If it is short, the print dialog is still shrinking the page.