Calligraphy practice paper
Ascender, waist, baseline and descender lines with angled slant guides. Set the slant to match the hand you are learning.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
Setting the slant for your hand
Different scripts have different characteristic slants, and getting it consistent is most of what makes lettering look trained. Copperplate is conventionally 55° from the horizontal. Italic is much more upright at around 80–85°. Spencerian sits near 52°. Modern brush lettering is deliberately looser, but picking an angle and holding it still beats having no reference.
x-height and nib widths
Traditional broad-edge calligraphy sets the x-height in nib widths rather than millimetres — typically five nib widths for italic, four for uncial. Measure your nib, multiply, and enter that as the x-height. The ascender and descender control then sets how far the tall and dropping strokes extend, usually between one and one and a half times the x-height.
Guide spacing
The slant lines are there to check your angle, not to write between. Spaced too closely they become visual noise; too far apart and you drift between them. Around one and a half to two and a half x-heights apart tends to work. Set the spacing to zero to remove them entirely and keep only the horizontal guides.
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.