Italic calligraphy paper, A4
Italic guides on A4, ruled at the gentle 5 degree lean that chancery italic actually uses.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
Italic barely slants
Beginners over-slant italic because they associate calligraphy with copperplate, which leans about 35 degrees off vertical. Classical chancery italic leans only 5 degrees or so. The character of the hand comes from compressed oval letterforms and from branching strokes, where the arch of an n leaves the stem partway up rather than at the baseline, not from the lean. Over-slanting produces something that looks like bad copperplate rather than good italic.
Five nib widths, measured with your own nib
Italic x-height is conventionally five nib widths. That is a proportion, not a measurement, so it changes with the pen: a 2 mm nib gives a 10 mm x-height, a 3.8 mm nib gives 19 mm. Step the nib up the page in a small staircase of squares to find the height for the pen in your hand, then set the spacing to match. Getting this right does more for the letterforms than any amount of practice at the wrong proportion.
A4 for European exemplars
Most calligraphy instruction outside North America is published on A4, and if you are working from an exemplar sheet it helps to practice at the same size and file the two together. Once the slant is automatic you can drop to plain ruled paper, which most people find happens sooner than they expect.
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.