A worksheet that prints wrong is worse than no worksheet. The letters come out the wrong size, the four-line rule stops matching the child’s hand, and a term of practice is done against a target that was never right. Six settings decide it, and one of them causes almost all the trouble.

The one that matters: scale

In the print dialog, set Scale to 100%, or Actual size. Not Fit to page, not Shrink oversized pages, and not the default, which on many printers is Fit.

Fit to page shrinks an A4 sheet by roughly 4-6% to leave room for the printer’s unprintable margin. On a coloring page nobody would notice. On a handwriting sheet it means a 44-point rule prints at about 41 points, and the letter size a child is being trained to produce no longer matches the paper they use at school. Two worksheets printed on two printers with Fit enabled will not even match each other.

Every DrawBuds PDF says this in the footer of the cover page for exactly that reason.

Paper size: A4 or Letter

Our PDFs are A4 — 210 × 297 mm — which is standard in the UK, Europe, India, Australia and most of the world. US Letter is 216 × 279 mm: wider and shorter.

Printing an A4 file on Letter paper with scaling off is fine. The page is 18 mm shorter, so the bottom of the sheet gets trimmed — on these worksheets that is the footer, not an exercise. That is much better than turning scaling on to make it fit.

Paper weight, and when it matters

Weight	Good for
80 gsm (ordinary copier paper)	Pencil and crayon. Fine for almost everything.
100 gsm	Felt pens. Stops the ink bleeding through to the next sheet.
120 gsm or card	Anything to be cut out, and anything to be laminated.

If a child uses felt pens on 80 gsm, put a spare sheet underneath. It costs nothing and saves the rest of the pad.

Black and white, and grayscale

Every one of our PDFs is black ink only — no filled areas, no color, no shaded backgrounds. That is deliberate: a worksheet that empties a color cartridge does not get printed twenty times for a class.

If your printer defaults to color, switch it to black and white or grayscale anyway. Color printers reproduce grey by mixing cyan, magenta and yellow, which makes the light grey model letters muddy and can tint them. Pure black ink prints them as clean grey.

Duplex: usually don’t

Double-sided saves paper and ruins the exercise. A child pressing on a worksheet marks the reverse, and a page that has to be laid flat next to another cannot be if the pair is on one sheet. Print single-sided for anything a child writes on. Duplex is fine for the cover page and for the answer pages at the back of the maze book.

Printing only the pages you need

Every book here is one PDF, and most of them are 20 to 27 pages. Nobody needs all of it at once.

Use the page range box in the print dialog. Page 1 is always the cover, so the letter A is page 2, the letter B is page 3, and so on. Print the four letters in a child’s name, or this week’s five sight words, and leave the rest for later.

Laminating, and what it costs

Laminate a page and it becomes reusable with a dry-wipe pen: trace, wipe, trace again. Excellent for the pre-writing strokes and the shape pages, where the point is repetition of a movement.

Not for handwriting on ruled lines. A dry-wipe pen is slippery, sits on the surface, and needs a different amount of pressure from a pencil — so the child practises a grip they then have to change back. Laminate the movement pages, print the writing pages on paper.

Printing from a phone

Download the PDF first, then print from the file. Printing straight from a browser’s built-in PDF viewer often silently applies Fit to page and gives you no scale control at all. On both Android and iOS, open the downloaded file in the Files app, then share to the printer.

A quick check that the scale was right

Take a ruler to a printed page. The horizontal rules run from margin to margin, and on A4 at 100% that span measures 180 mm. If yours measures around 171, Fit to page was on. Fix the setting and reprint — it is worth the one sheet.

More on this: the order to teach handwriting, and pencil grip stages by age.