Helping your children with their handwriting skills has never been easier, and now you don't need perfect printing to do it. , a TrueType font designed by Richard Douglas, provides a plethora of perfectly printed letters on a background of three-line guides. The glyphs cover the complete keyboard, plus a number of special characters such as the diaeresis/umlaut and symbols for pounds sterling, degrees, copyright, and yen. (Everything a kindergartener could possibly need!)

Penmanship Print's ascenders and descenders are shorter than you might expect, but with this font I think that neatens up the overall look. The kerning is wide but perfectly spaced, making it easier to use Penmanship Print at smaller sizes: You can bring it down to as small as 12-point to label your child's school stuff, for instance, or use it at larger sizes for writing and reading practice. For me, the guidelines alone are worth the download time; the grave-accent key creates an unbroken handwriting guide that you can use in place of a space or without any text to create composition pages to spec. Penmanship Print is free for personal use; for commercial use (or for full embedding), contact Richard Douglas.

The True Type font from David Kerkhoff immediately takes me back to the days of chalkboards. Kerkhoff has used an almost-handwritten style--with slight variations in baseline and texture to indicate different amounts of hand pressure--and neatened it up to the point of perfection. (Or maybe he just has perfect handwriting.) DK Crayon Crumble includes all of the keyboard glyphs, plus many special characters. The lowercase a is single-story (rather than letterpress style), which makes it especially appropriate for early readers and writers. It includes accented letters, making it suitable for scrawling in French and Spanish as well as in English.

DK Crayon Crumble is stylish even though it doesn't include any fancy glyphs. In fact, its lack of unusually executed letters makes it especially legible. A fluid, informal subhead or display font, DK Crayon Crumble gets hard on the eyes at 18-point or smaller. The demo is free for personal use; for commercial use, you must purchase the full version for $15.