Blackletter calligraphy practice paper
Guide lines for blackletter and Gothic hands, ruled upright because these letters do not slant.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
Upright letters, angled pen
Blackletter confuses people because two different angles are involved. The letters themselves stand vertical, which is why the guides on this sheet are upright rather than slanted. What is angled is the pen: the nib is held at roughly 40 to 45 degrees to the horizontal, and that constant angle is what produces the thick verticals and hairline diagonals the hand is known for. Change the letter slant and it stops being blackletter; change the pen angle and it stops working at all.
Short ascenders, dense texture
Blackletter uses a comparatively short ascender relative to the x-height, which is part of why a page of it reads as a solid dark block. That density is the origin of the name and the reason the hand suits a heading or a short passage more than a page of continuous text. The ascender height is adjustable here if you are working a variant that runs taller.
Nib widths, not millimeters
As with any broad-edge hand, x-height is specified in nib widths rather than in absolute measurement. Textura is commonly ruled around five nib widths. Step your own nib up the page in a small staircase of squares to find the height for the pen you are holding, then set the spacing to match. The paper weight guide covers what to print on, since a broad nib lays down far more ink than copier paper can take.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100%, not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.