'Handwriting for Windows 2.1': Single User £29.99 on 3½" diskette for WIN95 and above with manual
'Handwriting for Windows 2.1': Site Licence £49.99 on 3½" diskette for WIN95 and above with manual

What is Handwriting for Windows?

Handwriting for Windows 2.1(HfW2.1) is a unique new combination of  handwriting software and cursive handwriting font. The idea behind Handwriting for Windows was originally conceived as an aid to producing the book ‘Enjoy Your Handwriting’ by Kath Balcombe. It was very obvious from the start that if teachers could get hold of such a product, it could well make books like the latter redundant! Using HfW2.1 really does allow you to produce handwriting practice worksheets and other exercises as easily as you would produce any other documents from your PC.

Producing neat, accurate originals in the style we would want children to copy is frustratingly difficult. Bad habits creep in and mistakes are made which are tedious to correct. The great advantage of using a wordprocessor is that mistakes are easily corrected and provided good ‘housekeeping’ practices are observed, the worksheet you produced last year should still be there and can be brought up on screen and edited and printed in a few seconds.

HfW combines the advantages of a wordprocessor with a unique font and utility. The font has been designed follow what we believe to be currently accepted good practices in the teaching of handwriting. The utility program ‘Handwriting for Windows 2.1’ not only allows documents to be put in a script font but also processes or ‘converts’ the document into handwriting with correct joins between letters.

You can see with the above example that letters join and furthermore, some of the letters have changed shape to take into account the letters they have to join to or in some cases, have joined to them.

It is also worth noting at this point that the letter ‘forms’ can be altered to suit personal preferences e.g.

Many users will prefer to start letters on the line by adding lead-in or entry strokes. This is catered for in the options section which forces all letters to start on the line.
As you can see, HfW2.1 also allows you to choose a ‘looped’ style which applies to the appropriate letters with descenders. You can combine loops and lead-ins to get:

The ability to choose and easily change letter shapes is one of the most useful attributes of HfW2.1.

HfW2 has several additional features when compared to its predecessor. In addition to more wordprocessing functions, it now comes with a total of six fonts. Three are fully fledged joining fonts, and three more are provided which complement the joining fonts but do not join. In each font set, there are two dotted versions which students can trace over. We expect these to be very popular. (Please note that these screenshots do not do justice to the printed output of HfW2.1 - it looks great!)