Chinese Character Practice Grid

Printable grids for practicing Chinese characters — Hànzì (汉字). These are the classic practice sheets: rice grid (mǐzìgé, 米字格) and field grid (tiánzìgé, 田字格), in whatever size and paper format you need.

PDFs

Ready-to-print PDFs are in the PDF/ folder. They are organized by the two things you already know: your paper size and whether you have a color printer.

PDF/<paper>/<color>/grid-<paper>-<color>-<guide>-<style>-<size>.pdf

Part	Choices
paper	a4, letter
color	color (red lines) or bw (gray lines, for B&W printers)
guide	solid or dashed guide lines
style	grid style — see Grid styles
size	box size in millimetres

For example, PDF/letter/color/grid-letter-color-solid-star-15mm.pdf is a 15 mm rice grid (mǐzìgé, 米字格) on Letter paper with solid red lines.

Which box size?

Size	Good for
10 mm	dense writing, lots of characters per page
15 mm	everyday practice
20 mm	beginners and stroke-order practice
25 mm	extra room, young learners
50 mm	brush calligraphy
80 mm	large brush calligraphy

10 mm	25 mm

Grid styles

Style	Example
star (or rice) — rice grid, mǐzìgé 米字格
cross (or field) — field grid, tiánzìgé 田字格
nine — nine-palace grid, jiǔgōnggé 九宫格
hui — return grid, huízìgé 回字格
ninestar — rice nine-palace grid, mǐzìhuígōnggé 米字回宫格
none — plain box

Make your own

Edit the settings at the top of grid.tex, then build:

lualatex grid.tex

This produces grid.pdf.

Settings

All settings are in the USER SETTINGS block at the top of grid.tex. Sizes are in centimetres.

Setting	What it does
\PaperOption	Paper: letterpaper, a4paper, a5paper, add ,landscape to rotate, or paperwidth=10cm,paperheight=15cm
\BoxSize	Size of one box (e.g. 1.5)
\ColGap / \RowGap	Space between columns / rows (0 for none)
\InnerStyle	Grid style (see above)
\GuideColor	Line color, e.g. red!70 or black!40 (fainter)
\GuideStyle	dashed or solid
\BorderColor	Outer box color (default black)
\HMode / \VMode	auto to center, manual for fixed margins
\MarginLeft etc.	Margins for manual mode (great for binder holes)

The number of rows and columns is worked out automatically to fit.

Overriding without editing the file

Set any value on the command line before \input{grid.tex}:

lualatex "\def\BoxSize{1.0}\def\PaperOption{a4paper}\input{grid.tex}"

Chain as many as you like, and use -jobname to name the output:

lualatex -jobname=mygrid "\def\BoxSize{2.0}\def\GuideColor{black!40}\input{grid.tex}"

Regenerate all the PDFs

./build-pdfs.sh

Stroke-order practice sheets

Print the stroke order of one character in the first boxes of the sheet: box 1 shows stroke 1, box 2 shows strokes 1–2, and so on (newest stroke in red), wrapping to the next row for many-stroked characters. Faint tracing boxes then fill the rest of the final step row, followed by empty practice boxes. Pinyin and meaning sit in a sans-serif header above the grid.

A simple character — 二 (èr, two), 2 strokes:

A medium character — 中 (zhōng, middle; China), 4 strokes:

A complex character — 鱻 (xiān, fresh), 33 strokes wrapping across four rows (tracing boxes fill the last one):

./character-pdf.sh --char 二 --pinyin "èr" --meaning "two"

This writes PDF/practice-u4e8c.pdf.

Requirements: the Python venv at venv/ (Python 3.13, standard library only) and the stroke data in data/ — both are committed to the repo, so there is nothing to install or download. Pinyin and meaning are printed exactly as given (no conversion of any kind).

Every grid setting has a matching flag, plus stroke-specific options such as --stroke-color, --new-stroke-color, --trace-color, --extract (single natural-size stroke), --direction on (stroke-direction arrows, off by default) and --trace-all on (tracing character in every box after the steps). Run ./character-pdf.sh --help for the full list, and see docs/PLAN.md for the design.

Multi-character practice sheets

chars-pdf.sh puts several characters on one page, in the classic row-per-character school worksheet style: each character occupies whole rows, in order, with its own pinyin/meaning label (the first character's label sits in the header band, the rest in the row gaps above their blocks).

./chars-pdf.sh --chars 天地玄黄
./chars-pdf.sh --list lists/tcc-simplified.tsv --range 1:8

--chars is for quick unlabeled sheets; --list (with optional --range A:B, 1-based inclusive data rows) pulls characters and labels from the same 4-column TSV format used by the HSK/strokes lists (a 5th carrier:index column, as in lists/strokes.tsv, extracts single strokes instead of whole characters). The layout is chosen with --layout:

Policy	Sheet
steps (default)	one stroke-order block per character: step boxes, tracing fills the final step row
steps-empty	steps + one practice row per character: 3 faint traces, rest empty (the school worksheet's 描三写八 — trace three, write the rest)
trace-row	one tracing row per character
model-row	one row per character: solid model + 2 faint traces, rest empty
sequence	characters flow one per box in reading order (copybook style)

Labels can be turned off with --labels off (needed if you set --row-gap below 0.4). In the sequence layout there are no per-block labels, but --seq-labels on prints each character's pinyin above its box — the 拼音描红本 learner-copybook form. All grid/stroke options from character-pdf.sh work unchanged, including --direction on and --trace-all on (which makes every remaining row a tracing row, cycling through the characters in order — with one character the whole page traces it, as before). One page too few for the list? The blocks must fit the grid — if they don't, the build aborts and tells you to use a smaller box size or fewer characters. Run ./chars-pdf.sh --help for the full list, and ./test-chars.sh for the validation suite.

HSK-1 workbook

Build practice sheets for all 174 HSK-1 characters (HSK 2.0 list, sorted from fewest to most strokes) plus a merged 174-page workbook:

./hsk-1-pdf.sh

Output goes to PDF/letter/color/custom/HSK-1/ — one PDF per character, named hsk-1-NNN-<pinyin>.pdf (e.g. hsk-1-158-ying3.pdf; NNN = stroke- count order = workbook page), plus hsk-1-workbook.pdf. The character list is lists/hsk-1.tsv (character, pinyin, meaning, tone-number slug); future levels follow the same pattern (hsk-2-pdf.sh with lists/hsk-2.tsv).

Stroke inventory workbook

Build practice sheets for the 25-stroke Chinese inventory (笔画) — diǎn, héng, shù, piě, nà, plus all hooked and folded compounds (shùgōu, wògōu, héngzhégōu, …):

./strokes-pdf.sh

This builds two sets — a plain set in PDF/letter/color/custom/strokes/ and a set with stroke-direction arrows in PDF/letter/color/custom/strokes-arrows/ — each as individual sheets (stroke-NNN-<name>.pdf) plus a merged 25-page workbook. Each stroke is extracted from a carrier character and shown at its natural size — small strokes (丶, ㇀) are placed clear of the guide lines. The inventory is lists/strokes.tsv.

The arrows show which way each stroke is written — here ㇂ (xiégōu, the slanting hook) sweeping down and flicking up at the end:

Thousand Character Classic copybook (千字文)

Build 描红本 (trace-over copybook) workbooks of the whole Thousand Character Classic — the poem flows one faint character per mizige box in poem order, with its poem-reading pinyin above each box (the 拼音描红本 learner form), page breaks on couplet boundaries, exactly the way the TCC has been practiced in China for centuries:

./tcc-pdf.sh

One run builds four workbooks in PDF/letter/color/custom/TCC/, in the two Chinese grid sizes (大格/小格): tcc-simplified-big.pdf and tcc-traditional-big.pdf at the 2.0 cm grid (the mainland primary-school learner size: 8×10 boxes, 10 couplets per page, 13 pages, every grid row exactly two four-character poem lines), plus tcc-simplified-small.pdf and tcc-traditional-small.pdf at the 1.5 cm grid (the upper-grade/adult size: 12×12 boxes, 18 couplets per page, 7 pages). Per-page PDFs are intermediates — staged in a temp dir, merged, discarded — so only the workbooks are left behind. --box-size 2.0|1.5 builds just one edition, --script simplified|traditional builds just one script, and --limit N builds only the first N couplets (smoke test). Each workbook's final page is partial; its empty rows are the 临写 copying space Chinese practice books traditionally end with. The lists are lists/tcc-simplified.tsv and lists/tcc-traditional.tsv — see TCC.md for sources, edition decisions, and pinyin notes.

License

Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE-apache.txt for details.

Copyright © 2026 Jeff Moe moe@spacecruft.org

Loveland, Colorado, USA