The Queensland fonts are designed in strict accordance with the current Queensland Modern Cursive style (also known as QCursive) as specified in various resource materials published by the Queensland Department of Education. The QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT fonts are based on Year 1-3 Queensland Department of Education handwriting resources chiefly Alphabet Pack Year 1 (PR114), Letter book Year 2 (PR115) and Handwriting Pack Year 3 (PR121), published by the Open Access Unit, 1997.* * The QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts are based on The Teaching of Handwriting: A Handbook published by Queensland Department of Education, Curriculum Development Services, 1984 (ISBN 0 7242 1399 7), Reprinted 1990 without reference to the year range 4-7 (ISBN 0 7242 4108 6) *. QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT is an evolved form of QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT and has more rounded, flowing and “natural” lettershapes.
In the QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT and QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts, the letters are unjoined. In the transitional QLD PreCursive GT font (based on the Yr 1-3 letterforms) the letters are unjoined but they have cursive exits and entries which the writer needs to master as they move towards fully joined writing.
Queensland and Tasmania share a convention regarding the drawing of the lowercase “d” that is different to other regions – the “d” is drawn with an exit tail whereas the similarly-shaped “a” is not. The stated reason for this is to prevent the student, who is new to writing & reading, from confusing d with b (being mirror-images of each other) and also from confusing d with a (differing only in the length of their vertical stem). The QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT and QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts contain the d with a tail as the default lettershape but they also contain the alternate d with no tail as an option.
The weight of the Regular fonts is intended to match the average pen thickness of the illustrations in the various Queensland Department of Education publications above. The Thick weight is approximately 170% of the Regular weight as per common typographic practice.
The QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT fonts are available as Regular (with and without directional arrows), OutIined (with and without directional arrows), Dotted (with and without directional arrows) and Thick. The QLD PreCursive GT fonts are each available as Regular, Thick and OutIined. These 10 fonts plus PDF Manual comprises the QLD Beginner GT Pack. The QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts (Regular, Thick and OutIined) and the QLD Flourished GT (Regular, Arrow) fonts are also available but are not included in the QLD Beginner GT Pack.
When fully joined, PreCursive becomes the Queensland Modern Cursive style. The automatically-joining fully cursive font QLD Cursive GT Pro is available as a separate package with its own Manual. The QLD Cursive GT Pro font is supplied in one weight which is slightly thinner than the stand-alone QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT-Regular, QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT-Regular and QLD PreCursive GT-Regular fonts to reflect the fact that, by the time the student begins cursive writing, they will be probably be using more refined writing implements such as ball-point pens etc. Also, the lighter weight allows the cursive joins to be displayed more accurately and clearly. There are no Thick, Outlined, Dotted or Directional Arrow versions in the QLD Cursive GT Pro font.
The QLD Cursive GT Pro font is a sophisticated OpenType font that will only function to its full potential in applications which are OpenType-aware and which recognize special OpenType features called Stylistic Sets. At present, the list of such applications is limited mainly to Microsoft Word and Publisher (2010/2011 & later), Apple Pages (v5.6 & later), Adobe InDesign, Quark XPress (2016 & later), CorelDRAW (X6 & later), Sketch and TextEdit. Note that the current versions of Word and Publisher only support the use of one Stylistic Set at a time providing basic joining functionality but limiting the full capabilities of the font. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (up to and including CC) do not support Stylistic Sets.
The QLD Cursive GT Pro font does not require the use of any external utility or application to create the cursive joins between letters – the joining is completely automatic, occurring in real time as letters are typed. All you need to do is select the joining level you want (see the Manual's Quick Start Guide) and start typing!
The QLD Cursive GT Pro font is a “combo” font, providing access to the Beginner, Pre-Cursive and Cursive styles all within a single font file without the need to change fonts in the application’s font menu. The font also includes two extensions of the Queensland Modern Cursive style, allowing looped letterforms for g h j k l y z, in addition to the looped f which is already permitted in the basic Queensland Modern Cursive. Although not specifically mentioned in any of the above Queensland Department of Education publications, fully-looped joining is part of the natural development of handwriting and it is included in the official styles for most other Australian regions. Also included in the QLD Cursive GT Pro font is QLD Flourished Alphabet (unjoined) and QLD Flourished Cursive.
The QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT, QLD, QLD PreCursive GT and QLD Cursive GT Pro fonts slope to the right at an angle of 10° to the vertical and diagonal joins are at 45° as described in the Queensland specifications. The QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts slope to the right at 7.5°. If your application has controls for slanting text, the fonts can be slightly skewed in either direction to achieve other slopes if preferred.
The default numbers for the Queensland Year 1-3 style are half-height ie lowercase height. In addition to half-height numbers, alternate threequarter-height numbers and corresponding mathematical symbols are supplied in the QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT and QLD PreCursive GT fonts. Threequarter-height numbers are recommended from Year 5 on. The default numbers for the QLD Beginner Yr 4-7 GT fonts are full-height (uppercase).The QLD Cursive GT Pro font contains half-height numbers by default, with threequarter -height and full-height numbers as options. Special OpenType features makes it simple to switch between the different number styles.
All fonts can be set to display with or without horizontal guide lines (four lines/three spaces) with no need to change fonts to get the lines – just turn them on or off within your application (for instructions on how to do this see the Quick Start Guide in the manual). If you need to have coloured guidelines see our instruction document Coloured Dotted-Thirds GT_v2.1.pdf
The full multi-lingual character set for the QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT-Regular and QLD Beginner Yr 1-3 GT-Thick fonts can be viewed here.
The QLD Tight Text GT Pack is a 4-font OpenType family (Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic) in the QLD style, optimised for use in text with normal linespacing. The Italics are based on the PreCursive letterforms. The height of the capital letters as well as the length of the ascenders (b, d, f, h, k, l, t) and descenders (f, g, j, p, q, y, z) have all been reduced, making normal linespacing possible. The fonts have similar proportions, size and linespacing to normal text fonts (eg Arial, Helvetica etc) at the same point size. Ideal for school newsletters, pupil's reports, worksheets, forms, websites and documents, allowing them to be written in the same recognisable style that the students are learning to write - but avoiding the very wide linespacing that you would get if you were to use our Beginner teaching fonts. Multi-Language support - contains all special characters required for Australian Aboriginal, NZ Maori, Classical Latin (Phonetic) and many other commonly-taught languages which use the latin alphabet. Enhanced Maths support, with the ability to type "true" fractions automatically. Includes Special custom Keyboard Layout software (Mac & Windows) for use with Australian Aboriginal and Phonetic Latin (Note - Keyboard Layouts for all the other languages are already standard with the Mac and Windows operating systems). Note these fonts don't include horizontal guidelines. Numbers are cap-height by default. Not available as individual fonts. Delivered by download. 10-computer licence. Win/Mac compatible. The QLD Tight Text GT fonts are NOT recommended for use by pupils in the very early handwriting teaching stages.
* * Download free QLD Department of Education handwriting Syllabus "The Teaching of Handwriting: a Handbook" 1MB PDF
from the learningplace.com.au website:
* Download free QLD Department of Education Year 1-3 handwriting Resources (total 31MB PDFs)
from the learningplace.com.au website:
Please note that this downloaded material is Copyright QLD Department of Education.
