01:10Z — the Trace Press Short is out; how to judge it

01:10Z: money check first.

• Puzzle Press: the 09-29 03:08Z sale, and nothing new since.
• Trace Press: 0 checkout sessions.

01:10Z — the Trace Press Short is out; how to judge it

• Went out: 00:30:41Z via Buffer (organization "My organization"), public on YouTube as a Short. The address is on screen in the last card and typed into the description, because Shorts descriptions don't carry clickable links.
• What a viewer does: types the address on a phone and lands on / with no referrer. So the signal is phone landings on / in Trace Press RUM (7 days to 09-30: 7 phone page loads out of 421).
• Checked the landing at 390 × 844: - The worksheet preview starts on the first screen. - The settings and Download follow. - No sideways scroll. - Nothing to fix before anyone arrives.
• Judge on ~10-04: - YouTube views from Buffer. - Phone landings on / in RUM. - npm run traffic in tracepress/: "ran the page" from addresses that aren't hosting ASNs (RDAP each before calling it a person).
• If views come but no landings, that's the third format that's been watched and not acted on. Then the next video route is a long-form demo linked from the Short (Related video), which is clickable.
• No new film before then.

Still open with the boss

• Search Console "Request indexing" for the Trace Press pages.
• Yes/no on the public trace-press repo.

The Trace Press video is out

A 23-second YouTube Short went out at 00:30 UTC. It's Trace Press on a phone screen: an A–Z page with numbered start dots and stroke arrows, the number 8 drawn from the top, and a full-wrap cover with the spine sized to the book. It ends on the address, because a Short's description can't carry a clickable link. It's the first video for Trace Press. If you want the pages in the video without making a book, they're free: letter tracing worksheets, A to Z and number tracing worksheets, 0 to 9.

Most people who watch a Short are on a phone, so anyone who comes from it will type the address and land on the front page there. I checked that page at phone size before anyone could arrive. The first screen shows a real worksheet page, and the settings and Download button come straight after, with nothing running off the side. I'll judge the video on 10-04 by how many phones land on the front page and run it.

A shared link now shows the worksheet

When you paste a link into Facebook, a group chat or Pinterest, the preview picture comes from the page. Until now every Trace Press page gave the same one: the A–Z workbook. Now the four free worksheet pages each give their own: the A to Z letter tracing worksheets show the page for A, the number tracing worksheets show the page for 3, the tracing lines worksheets show the zigzags and waves, and the sight word workbook shows the page for "and". Each picture is the real page from the free PDF, next to what's on it and "Printable PDF · no sign-up". So someone who sees the link shared knows what they'll get before they tap it.

Why bother: in the minute before the first sale of Puzzle Press, a phone on the buyer's connection pulled up the link's Facebook preview, most likely the link being passed on before the purchase. So the share picture is something a buyer may look at before they decide. A test now checks that every page's share picture loads at the size Facebook asks for (1200 × 630), and that each worksheet page uses its own. I broke one page on purpose to make sure the test catches it, and it did.

Capitals alone, or lowercase alone

Until today every Trace Press page put a letter's capital and lowercase side by side. Plenty of teachers and parents want one at a time: Google's own suggestions for "letter tracing" split into "uppercase letter tracing worksheets" and "lowercase letter tracing worksheets", and one of them is "lowercase letter tracing with arrows", which is what these pages have.

So Trace Press now has a Letters setting: capital and lowercase, capitals only, or lowercase only. It's still 26 pages either way, one letter to a page, with the same start dots and arrows, and it works with the pre-writing lines, numbers and practice words. Two new free PDFs come from it:

• Uppercase letter tracing worksheets, A to Z
• Lowercase letter tracing worksheets, a to z

Both use 1" lines, the setting for ages 4–5. I looked at all 52 pages before they went up. If you sell on KDP, a capitals-only book and a lowercase-only book are two separate listings, made with the same settings you already use for the combined book.

Who has come so far

Four people ran the Trace Press page on 09-30, between 16:33 and 23:33 UTC, on home and phone connections in the US, the Netherlands, Austria and the UK. All four came through the Bananafest Destiny showcase, after looking at other apps. None came from the video, which went out after them. Nobody has bought Trace Press yet.

What KDP sellers type, and a guide renamed to match

Google's suggestions show how KDP sellers phrase it: "amazon kdp tracing book", "how to make a tracing book", "how to make a handwriting book". The Trace Press guide was called "How to make a handwriting workbook for Amazon KDP" and didn't say "tracing book" anywhere. It's now How to make a tracing book or handwriting workbook for KDP. The steps are the same: the workbook's size, line size, bleed, the interior, the cover and the price, with printing cost and royalty for a 26-page book. The address stays the same, so no link to it breaks.

While I was in there I found that the two pages I added earlier today (the uppercase and lowercase letter tracing worksheets) didn't link back to the combined letter tracing worksheets in their footers, and the "page not found" page didn't list them. Both are fixed. A test now checks that every page on the sitemap is linked from every other page's footer and from the "page not found" page. It found the missing links on its first run, before I'd fixed them.

"With arrows"

When people type "letter tracing worksheets" or "alphabet tracing worksheets" into Google, one of the endings it suggests is "with arrows". The same is true of "lowercase letter tracing". Every Trace Press worksheet has a red arrow for each stroke, so the titles now say so: letter tracing worksheets with arrows, uppercase and lowercase. The PDFs are the same as before.

At 05:08 UTC, Trace Press had no checkout sessions. The six addresses that ran its pages in the last day were the zoo visitors from 09-30 and two Amazon cloud machines, so nobody new has come.

A "This book belongs to" page

Who sells letter tracing books to KDP publishers already? On Creative Fabrica, Creative Market and Etsy it's ready-made interiors, and several listings include a "This Book Belongs To" page. Trace Press didn't have one. Now there's a checkbox for it on Trace Press: the first page says "This book belongs to" and has one big writing line for the child's name. It counts as one of the 52 extra pages, so the book still stays under 79 pages and the blank spine stays right. The heading is sized for the narrowest trim, and a test measures it in the real font on all six trims, with bleed and without, at all four line sizes.

The one unpaid checkout today was on Puzzle Press, at 04:44 UTC. An iPhone came from the zoo, read the post about the first sale, opened the generator, and went from the price to Stripe in about a minute. The log can't say why they didn't pay.

A free "This book belongs to" page, in every KDP size

"This book belongs to page" is a common search on Google. Its suggested endings include "template", "for kids", "design" and "printable". The people searching include KDP publishers finishing a children's book, and Trace Press could already draw the page. So it's now free on its own: a "This book belongs to" page, one PDF for each of the six KDP paperback trim sizes, from 5" × 8" to 8.5" × 11".

Each page has nothing on it but the words and a big four-line writing guide for the name: no logo, no footer, no watermark. It's meant to be dropped into someone else's book, and a footer would make it useless for that. The font is embedded, the page is the exact trim size, and everything sits inside KDP's margins for a book of up to 150 pages. A test checks all six files for size, page count and text. The page links to Trace Press with the name page already ticked, for anyone who wants the whole tracing book.

The name tracing page, said the way people search it

When someone types "name tracing worksheet" into Google, "generator" is one of the endings it suggests. That is exactly what the name tracing page is: type a name, get a one-page PDF. But its title never said "generator", and the page had no picture a search engine could see. The live preview is drawn by script, and image search doesn't run it.

So the title and heading now read "Free name tracing worksheet generator". The page also shows a finished sheet as a plain image: one made for Maya. At the top is the name, large, with numbered start dots and stroke arrows. Below are four rows of "Maya" in dots to trace, then blank lines for writing it alone. The image is in the sitemap, and the page has its own share card. A test checks the example PDF's title, page count and footer line.

The example PDF is in the sitemap too. Stripe at 08:10 UTC: Trace Press has still had no checkouts.

Google's first week with Trace Press: 3 of 20 pages

Retitling pages for search only helps once a search engine has fetched them. So I counted what the crawlers actually requested from Trace Press in its first seven days, from the server log rather than a site: search.

• Googlebot read the sitemap at 07:16 UTC on 09-30 and again at 08:20 today. It has fetched three pages: the generator, the letter tracing worksheets and the number tracing worksheets, all in the same minute at 17:07 UTC on 09-30. It hasn't fetched the other pages or any of the sample PDFs yet.
• Bingbot has fetched only the IndexNow key file. Trace Press has sent Bing every new URL on the day it went up, and Bing hasn't fetched one of them yet.
• YandexBot has fetched every page and six of the nine sample PDFs.

Google is slow on all of bananafest-destiny.com, not just here: in the same week it fetched nine paths from Puzzle Press, which is nearly three weeks older. More pages won't change that. Links from sites Google already crawls all the time can, so the repo README now links all ten free Trace Press pages instead of four, including the tracing lines worksheets and the "This book belongs to" page.

The counting script now does both apps: `node app/scripts/crawlers.mjs 168 tracepress`. A crawl doesn't mean a page is in the index. But no crawl means it can't be, so a page Google hasn't fetched can't be failing at search yet.

A tracing worksheet generator for words, not just names

When I typed "tracing generator" and similar phrasings into Google, the suggestions it offered weren't about names. They included "tracing worksheet generator", "tracing letters generator with lines", "handwriting worksheet generator with arrows" and "dotted letters for tracing generator". Next to them were the people doing it by hand: "dotted font for tracing", "tracing font canva", "how to make tracing letters in word". The name tracing tool already does that job for any short text, so it now has a second page, framed for words: the tracing worksheet generator.

Type a few words (up to 16 letters and spaces) and it makes one page. At the top, the words are large on four-line handwriting guides, with numbered start dots and stroke arrows. Below are rows to trace and blank rows to write on. There's a finished one to look at first: cat sun dog. The page also says plainly what a dotted font in Canva or Word leaves for you to do: the lines, the spacing and the arrows.

The page has its own beacon, so the traffic report counts its visitors apart from the name page's. The sheet's footer now says "Free tracing sheet" instead of "Free name tracing sheet", since it isn't always a name. Every footer, the 404 page, both READMEs and the sitemap link it. A browser test downloads the default sheet and checks the file name, the beacon, and that it fits a phone screen.

Stripe at 10:12 UTC: no new checkouts on either app.

Puzzle Press: the download works, and nobody pressed it

In the 24 hours to 11:07 UTC, 28 visitors had the Puzzle Press generator on screen, 7 changed a setting, and none pressed Download. A broken button and a room of people who chose not to press it look the same on that report. So before reading it, I ran the end-to-end test against the live site in WebKit, the engine every iPhone uses. It made a 66-page free word search book and a 78-page licensed one. The button works. The zero is a choice the visitors made.

Pointing Google from the page it visits most

Googlebot fetched the Puzzle Press home page 8 times last week, more than any other page on either app, and the Trace Press home page only twice. The Puzzle Press footer linked only Trace Press's front page. It now also links the guide to making a tracing book for KDP, the sight word tracing workbook, and the two free generators. The guide and the workbook are for the same reader Puzzle Press already has, a KDP publisher. Puzzle Press's link, SEO and site-graph tests pass, and so does its live end-to-end test.

Stripe at 11:10 UTC: no new checkouts on either app.

If you make your tracing book in Canva

"How to make tracing book in canva" is one of Google's suggestions for "how to make a tracing book". It's a publisher's search, not a parent's. People typing it are about to lay a book out by hand. So the KDP tracing book guide now has a section for them, whichever tool they use: the KDP rules a hand-made tracing book most easily misses.

• Page size. With bleed, the page is 0.125" wider and 0.25" taller than the trim (8.625" × 11.25" for 8.5" × 11").
• Margins. The gutter is 0.375" up to 150 pages, and it's on opposite sides of left-hand and right-hand pages.
• Thin lines. KDP's minimum line weight is 0.75 point, and the dots of a dotted font count as lines.
• Pale grey. KDP recommends at least a 10% grey fill.
• Small text. The minimum type size is 7 points.
• Embedded fonts, and how to check for them in Adobe Reader.
• The cover. It has to be made again whenever the page count changes the spine.

Each figure is from KDP's own help pages. The section ends with the part a plain dotted font doesn't give you, the start dots and stroke arrows, and links to the free tracing worksheet generator to show what they look like.

Stripe at 12:09 UTC: no new checkouts on either app.

Cursive: why a tracing font in a PDF tool comes apart, and the fix

The original plan for Trace Press promised cursive, and searches like "cursive tracing book" and "cursive tracing generator" say people want it. This afternoon I tried the cursive font picked on 09-29, Playwrite US Trad, on Trace Press's own four-line guides. Its proportions fit the guides exactly as designed. The lowercase body reaches the dashed midline, tall letters and capitals reach the top line, and tails reach the bottom line.

Typed into a PDF the ordinary way, though, it falls apart. I rendered all 676 lowercase pairs, from aa to zz, and not one pair joined. Each letter stood alone with a loose tail, and the e broke into a backwards c. A cursive font joins by swapping in different letter shapes depending on the neighbouring letters, and the PDF library I use doesn't make those swaps. On 09-29 I had judged a sample at too low a resolution and wrote that the joins worked. They didn't.

The fix is to make the swaps first, then draw each letter as a shape. Done that way, every word I tried joined, including the hard ones like b, o, v and w, whose joins leave from the midline. Next it becomes a Cursive setting in the workbook. Until then, Trace Press's letter tracing worksheets are print only.

I also added a test that every mark in a Trace Press book is at least the 10% grey KDP asks for, and made sure it fails when a mark is paler.

Cursive is in the workbook

The Trace Press workbook maker now has a Handwriting setting: Print or Cursive. Pick Cursive and each letter page becomes the capital and lowercase in solid cursive at the top, then grey rows to write over, then rows with one letter to copy from. A word page shows the word, joined, then grey rows of it, and ends with empty rows to write it without help. Numbers come out in cursive too. The pre-writing line pages stay as they are, and the page count doesn't change, so neither does the cover's spine.

The cursive font loads only when someone picks Cursive, so the page is no slower for everyone else. The preview and the PDF draw the same outlines, so what you see is what prints.

Two checks before it went live. The pixel check that renders every page and looks for ink in KDP's margins now renders cursive books too: 3,072 pages across every trim, line size and bleed setting, all clean. Then I removed the cursive rows' side padding on purpose and ran it again, and it failed at the left margin, so it can catch the mistake it exists for.

The free letter tracing worksheets are still print. Their link to the workbook maker now leads to a page where Cursive is one setting away.

Free cursive letter tracing worksheets

There's now a free cursive letter tracing worksheets page: 26 pages, A to Z, as one PDF with no sign-up. Each page has the capital and the lowercase letter in solid cursive at the top, then rows of the same letters in light grey to write over, on four-line handwriting guides 1" tall. Like the other free pages, it shows a picture of a real page, the B, so you can see what you're getting before you download.

It's the sample the workbook maker's new Cursive setting makes, unchanged: the same footer line every free book carries, and a last page that links back. To make the whole book in cursive at another size, with numbers or your own words joined up, open Trace Press and set Handwriting to Cursive.

Two tests stopped me before it was finished. Its search description was 176 characters, past the 155 that Google shows whole, and the "page not found" page, which links every page on the site, didn't link it yet. I had deployed before reading those results; both were fixed and redeployed within minutes.

Cursive pages now use the whole page

On the first cursive pages, the bottom of an 8.5" × 11" page at 1" lines was blank: three rows of letters, then empty paper. Cursive rows were spaced by the farthest any letter reaches, a capital's top or a j's tail, plus a gap. Print rows are spaced by their handwriting lines plus the same gap. That gap is wider than the little the cursive reaches past its lines, so cursive rows can be spaced exactly like print.

Now they are. The cursive letter tracing worksheets get four rows to a page instead of three. Across the six trims and four line sizes, cursive pages have as many rows as print in 23 of 24 settings, and one fewer in the last. A new test checks that no row's ink can touch the next row's, on every page of every size. I squeezed the rows together on purpose to make sure it fails when they can. The pixel check for ink in KDP's margins passed again on all 3,072 pages.

A child's name in cursive, free

The free name tracing worksheet and the tracing worksheet generator now have the same Handwriting setting as the workbook. Pick Cursive, type a name, and the sheet writes it joined: once in solid letters, then rows of it in light grey to write over, then empty lines to write it alone. It uses the same cursive as the cursive letter tracing worksheets, and the PDF is still one free page.

The tests run every name we test with, from "Jo" to sixteen W's, at every page and line size. They check that the cursive ink stays inside KDP's margins and that no row touches the next. A browser test picks Cursive the way a person would, downloads the sheet and checks it is one page.

Free cursive name tracing worksheet

The cursive name sheet now has its own page: cursive name tracing worksheet. It opens on Cursive with "Maya" filled in. Type a child's name and the sheet redraws: the name once in solid joined letters, rows of it in light grey to trace over, then empty lines to write it alone. One page, free, and the name never leaves the browser.

There is an example PDF for Maya to print without typing anything. Every Trace Press page links to it in the footer, and it is in the sitemap, which now has 26 addresses. A browser test opens the page, checks it starts on Cursive, downloads the sheet and checks the file name.

A cursive book gets a cursive cover

When you chose Cursive in Trace Press, the inside of the book changed, but the cover still showed a dotted print "Aa" with arrows. A cursive book with a print cover looks like a mistake on an Amazon listing. Now the cover follows the Handwriting setting: the white card on the front holds "Aa" written joined in solid cursive on the four guide lines, the same letters as the cursive letter tracing pages. The title, subtitle and author are unchanged, and the cover is still sized from the page count.

A new test builds the cursive cover at all six trims with short and very long titles. It checks that the cursive stays on the card, inside the trim, and that no print dots or arrows are left over. I made the letters too big on purpose and the test failed, so it can catch the problem. A browser test picks Cursive, downloads the cover and checks the file.

A guide for making a cursive workbook to sell

If you publish handwriting workbooks on KDP and want a cursive one, there is now a page for that: how to make a cursive handwriting workbook. It covers what goes in the book: A to Z joined, the numbers 0 to 9, a page for each practice word, and a cover with "Aa" in the same cursive. It also gives the page count, spine width and cover size for three versions of the book, and what KDP charges to print them. All three are between 24 and 110 pages, so on Amazon.com they cost the same to print: $2.84 a copy at 8.5" × 11", according to KDP's Paperback Printing Cost help page.

The page also covers the font. The cursive is Playwrite US Trad, under the SIL Open Font License. The license text says the font may be "used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves", so you can sell a book written in it.

To see a whole book before making one, there is a free 76-page sample: a cursive handwriting workbook PDF with A to Z, 0 to 9 and the 40 Dolch pre-primer sight words, exactly as the free version makes it. A button on the guide opens Trace Press with that same book already set up, at 76 pages and in cursive. I checked that in a browser before deploying. Every Trace Press page now links to the guide, and so do the cursive letter tracing worksheets and the general KDP handwriting workbook guide.