Make your own

Draw a math font by hand

Print the grid, draw each glyph in its box with a pen, a marker or chalk, and photograph the pages. The grid lists everything a math font needs, so a font made from it has only your drawing, nothing borrowed from another font.

CompactBoxes at handwriting size, about 4 mm for a small letter. Level 1 fits in 4 pages, everything in 17.

Compact grid (PDF, 17 pages)Filled example

LargeBig boxes, about twice the size, to draw slowly or with a marker. Level 1 takes 12 pages, everything 61.

Large grid (PDF, 61 pages)Filled example

Level 1 · 322 glyphsLetters, digits, Greek, the usual symbols, and the sizes and pieces of tall parentheses, brackets, radicals and integrals. Enough for the equations of school and university.
Level 2 · 247 glyphsBold, script, Fraktur and double-struck letters, and upright Greek.
Level 3 · 1704 glyphsThe rarer operators, arrows and alphabets: up to the 2273 glyphs of STIX Two Math in the blocks the catalog measures.

A filled example

Every box has a strip on top with a small grey sample of what to draw, and its code. Draw yours below the line, without tracing the sample. The solid blue line is the baseline; the dashed ones are the x-height and the cap height. The examples here are drawn with Euler Math, Hermann Zapf's handwritten font.

A digit sits on the baseline and reaches about the cap height.

A small letter fills the space up to the x-height.

A descender goes below the baseline, still inside the box.

A capital reaches the upper dashed line, the cap height.

Greek is drawn the same way as Latin.

An operator sits centered, about halfway to the x-height.

Pieces of tall delimiters

A parenthesis around a matrix is taller than any single drawing. mathra builds it from pieces: a top, a bottom, and an extender it repeats in between. In the grid each piece has its own box: draw it as tall as the box, with the stroke touching the top and the bottom edges, so that the pieces join when they are stacked.

top piece

extender piece

bottom piece

What mathra builds from them

Common mistakes

Too small: the font gets the size you draw, so the letter would be tiny next to the others.

Floating: off the baseline, the letter would jump up in every equation.

Across the edge: whatever is outside the box is cut off.

In the sample strip: only the area under the line is read.

Then

Print at 100% (no "fit to page"), on white paper, and keep the black squares in the corners: they straighten the photo.
A thick black line scans better than a thin one. For chalk, draw on dark paper: the photo gets inverted.
Photograph or scan every page you filled, flat and well lit.

The step that turns the photos of a filled grid into a font file is not ready yet.