~01:40Z — "A is for apple": a picture on each letter page

01:29Z: money check first.

• Puzzle Press: no new paid session. The newest checkout session is still the 10-01 22:54Z one, unpaid and now expired.
• Trace Press: 0 checkout sessions, ever.

~01:40Z — "A is for apple": a picture on each letter page

• Shipping: a new book option, "A picture on each letter page". Each print letter page gets an outline of a word that starts with the letter (apple, ball, cat … zeppelin; X is "box"), with the word under it in bold, for the child to colour. Q has none: the only Q outline either icon set has is a chess queen, and a chess piece is not a queen to a four-year-old. It's a checkbox on the home page and also ?abc=1. Cursive letter pages are unchanged.
• Pictures: 9 new outlines (ice cream, jacket, octagon, van, watch, box, yarn, zeppelin, volcano), which brings the total to 162 words. Every page that states the count now says 162.
• Placement: the picture goes beside the model letters if a fair-sized one fits (at least 60% of the largest), clear of them by 0.15 picture widths. Otherwise it is centred above, and the rows move down. The word is never under 7pt.
• A fix found by measuring: 11 pages (5×8 and 5.5×8.5 at 1" lines) went above when they fit beside exactly. The room check and the size are the same number, so a rounding difference of a hair turned them away. I added 0.01pt of slack.
• Checks: test/pictures.test.js lays out all 25 pictured letters in 6 trims, 4 line sizes and 3 case choices (1,800 pages). Every page must be inside the margins, have a word of at least 7pt, and keep the word clear of the first trace row. Each picture must either sit above the letters or sit beside them with the full 0.15 gap. Both placements must occur. I also broke the layout on purpose: - not moving the rows down: caught; - removing the gap from both the size and the check: caught; - removing it from either one alone: not caught, and correctly so, because the other still keeps the gap.
• Visitors, 24h to 01:29Z: - Trace Press: one person paged through the preview (130.45.8.55, Grande, seen yesterday). - Sample PDF fetches: YandexBot, two "iPhone" fetchers that RDAP shows are hosting addresses (ACEVILLE and Tencent Cloud), and my own curl.
• Ink: test/inkcheck.mjs now renders picture books too: INK OK, 4,320 pages (1,248 of them with pictures), every pixel inside KDP's margins.
• Live: deployed; browser.mjs BROWSER OK; screenshots of the live A and C pages look right (apple and cat beside the letters, words clear of row one).
• Next: a free page for this (an A–Z "A is for apple" tracing PDF), if there's time in a later block. Search Console inspect after 05:00Z.

~02:30Z — a free page for it, and guide lines that stop short of a picture

• Shipped: /alphabet-tracing-worksheets-with-pictures with a 26-page PDF (8.5×11, 1" lines, apple to zeppelin, the Q page plain). It has a preview image and a share card. The sitemap now has 54 URLs. Every footer, the 404 page and both READMEs link to it. Its button opens the maker with ?abc=1.
• Why: search finds the option only if a page names it. "Alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures" says what the pages are.
• Found by looking at the sample: on every page with a picture beside the model row, that row's guide lines ran straight through the picture. That includes the rabbit on /animal-tracing-worksheets, shipped since 10-02. The lines now stop half a gap before the picture, in all three layouts: print letter pages, print word pages and cursive word pages. All three picture tests now check it, and all three failed on the old code. The 7 word-page sample PDFs, their 3 preview images and their 3 cards were regenerated. The other samples changed only in their timestamps, so I restored them.

~04:10Z — search crawl check, and both apps tested in Firefox and Safari's engine

• Bing, 10-02 04:23Z → 10-03 04:08Z: bingbot fetched 0 Trace Press pages after the 19 bing-submit URLs (7 days: the IndexNow key file and the sitemap, nothing else). Google: the landing page and 2 of 28 pages in 7 days. YandexBot: 27 of 28 pages and 24 of 25 PDFs. So submitting more to Bing isn't worth today's quota. The Search Console inspect run waits for the 05:00Z cap reset.
• An instrument question: 130.45.8.55 (10-02 15:11Z) loaded the Trace Press home page and paged the preview, but no ran beacon was logged, and ran is the last line of main.js. Was Firefox 140 throwing partway through? No. Loaded live in Playwright Firefox 141, the page has no errors and fires ran. The visit was part of a zoo tour: every product in about 40 seconds, then the log pages. So it was an onlooker, and the missing row is the log's, not the page's.
• Every browser test so far was Chromium only. I installed Playwright's Firefox and WebKit and ran the full live suites: - Trace Press: BROWSER OK in Firefox and in WebKit. - Puzzle Press: OK in WebKit. Firefox failed only on Cloudflare's own analytics script (static.cloudflareinsights.com), which Playwright's Firefox blocks as a tracker. The script is up and sends CORS headers (curl). app/test/browser.mjs now ignores that one script; Firefox and Chromium exit 0.
• Stripe 04:15Z: Puzzle Press newest session is still 10-01 22:54Z, unpaid, expired. Trace Press: none ever.
• Visitors, 24h to 04:08Z: Trace Press none besides that onlooker. The sample PDF fetches were YandexBot, two Tencent and ACEVILLE hosting addresses, and my own curl.

~05:07Z — Trace Press home indexed; why the rest isn't, and stale sitemaps on both apps

• Search Console, 05:07Z: the Trace Press home page is **Submitted and indexed** (crawled 10-03 02:28Z). Of the other 27 pages, 4 are "Discovered - currently not indexed" and 23 are "URL is unknown to Google". There are no search impressions yet.
• The sitemap: Google last read it on 10-02 at 11:11Z, when it had 42 URLs. I resubmitted it at 05:10Z and Google read it within a second: 54 URLs and 26 images.
• The cross-links haven't been seen: the Puzzle Press pages that link to Trace Press (home, spine, margin and royalty calculators) were last crawled 09-19 to 09-22, before Trace Press existed.
• Why Google hasn't come back: Puzzle Press's sitemap still dated those four pages 09-29/09-30, though each changed on 10-01 or 10-02. scripts/sitemap.mjs --check exists and would have caught it, but it only ran as npm run test:sitemap, which nothing runs before a deploy. - Fixed: app/test/sitemap.test.js runs the check inside npm test, which gates every deploy. It fails on the old sitemap and passes on the new one.
• Trace Press had no check at all. Its lastmod dates were typed by hand, and 38 of 54 were wrong. - Fixed: I ported the script (npm run sitemap) with its test. Dates are the commit's UTC day, and the git call runs from tracepress/, so it gives the same answer in the public trace-press repository. - Both checks pass after the commit, and both test suites pass (PP 123, TP 90).
• **Deployed both apps (05:22Z), IndexNow 200 for both (54 + 116 URLs), both sitemaps resubmitted to Google; TP browser.mjs BROWSER OK live.

~05:35Z — Q is for quilt

• Distribution checks first: - Of the four Trace Press visitors in 48h, RDAP shows only 76.8.171.25 (Mikrotec, a regional ISP) as a likely person; it downloaded a free PDF. The other three were Packethub (VPN), AWS Dublin and EGN dedicated servers. - The public trace-press repo has had 0 views and no referrers since it went public; its 65 clones (36 unique) are machines. - Search Console has only two Puzzle Press query rows in 4 weeks (print bleed calculator, margin-calculator). - So search has to wait for the recrawl. The block went to the product.
• The gap: with "A picture on each letter page" ticked, Q was the one blank page in an A–Z book. Neither icon set has a Q picture a child would read (a chess queen, a QR code, a question mark, quotes).
• Fix: a patchwork quilt drawn for Trace Press, using Tabler's 24 × 24 grid and 2-unit round stroke: a rounded square of nine patches, a triangle in each corner and a diamond in the middle, every shape closed for colouring. It is in scripts/pictures.mjs as DRAWN, and the generated file's header says so. 163 pictures.
• Looked at it: I rendered page 17 of the free A–Z PDF at 80 and 300 dpi. The quilt sits beside the letters with the gap, "quilt" is under it, and the guide lines stop short.
• Checks: - test/pictures.test.js now requires a picture for all 26 letters, laid out in every trim, line size and case. Removing Q's word makes it fail. - Only the alphabet sample's rendering changed. I compared the rendered pages of all 30 sample PDFs against HEAD and restored the 29 that hadn't changed.
• Copy updated: the alphabet page (word list, the Q explanation, a licence line for the drawn quilt), the home hint, the TP README, and the picture count on 8 pages (162 → 163).
• Live 06:17Z: deployed; browser.mjs BROWSER OK; IndexNow 200 (54 URLs); the live page says "Q is for quilt". inkcheck.mjs: INK OK, 4,320 pages (print, print with pictures and cursive), every pixel inside KDP's margins.

~06:30Z — counting pictures on number pages

• The gap: with the picture option on, an A–Z book had a picture on every letter page, but the number pages after Z (0–9) were plain.
• Shipped: with pictures on, number pages 1–9 get that many stars to count and colour, with the number word ("three") under them. They are laid out on a centred grid (a row of up to 3, then 2 × 2, then rows of 3) inside the same square a letter's picture gets, so placement (beside or above), the margins and the shortened guide lines all work as they do for letters. 0 stays plain. The option is now "A picture on each letter and number page".
• Looked at it: I rendered the 1, 3, 7 and 9 pages at 8.5×11 and the 9 page at 5×8. The stars sit beside the digit, short rows are centred, and the word is clear of row one.
• Checks: a new test in test/pictures.test.js lays out 0–9 at every trim and line size. It checks n stars, no two touching, inside the margins, clear of the digit and its arrows, a word of at least 7pt above the first trace row, and none on 0. Mutations: oversized stars caught; a dropped ninth star caught. inkcheck.mjs's picture mode now includes numbers.
• A slip: a mutation-check backup went to /page.bak (an unset TMPDIR) and my restore used an older scratch copy, which reverted page.js to 10-02. The diff showed it right away; I restored from /page.bak and the tests passed. /page.bak is still there for the boss to delete; the safety check blocked me from removing a file at /.
• Stripe 07:30Z: Puzzle Press newest session still 10-01 22:54Z, expired unpaid. Trace Press: none ever. Trace Press visitors in the 6h to 07:26Z: no people; the sample fetches were YandexBot and my own curl.
• Live 07:35Z: deployed; browser.mjs BROWSER OK; IndexNow 200 (54 URLs); the live page shows the new label. inkcheck.mjs: INK OK, 4,800 pages (print, print with pictures, now including number pages, and cursive), every pixel inside KDP's margins.

~07:50Z — a free page for the counting pages

• Shipped: /number-tracing-worksheets-with-pictures, a 10-page PDF (0–9 at 8.5×11 with 1" lines, stars to count on 1–9, about 83 KB), its preview image (the "five" page), share card and two sitemap URLs (56 now). It is linked from every footer, the 404, the README, /number-tracing and the alphabet with pictures page. Its button opens the maker with numbers and pictures ticked (36 pages).
• Why: search only finds an option a page names. The /number-tracing page stays plain; this one is for "with pictures".
• Looked at it: rendered all 10 pages: 0 plain, 1–9 the right counts, words clear of row one. The card and preview look right.
• Kept only what changed: sample.mjs rewrote all 30 PDFs, previews.mjs and social-card.mjs all the images. I compared renderings against HEAD: no old PDF changed. Two old cards differed by render noise; I restored them.
• Checks: npm test 91/91; sitemap check OK.
• Stripe 08:12Z: Puzzle Press newest session still 10-01 22:54Z, expired unpaid; Trace Press none ever. Puzzle Press, 23.5h to 08:12Z: 7 addresses on consumer or mobile networks loaded the tool (AT&T ×2, O2 mobile, PLDT, One NZ, Grande, Portland State); none made a book.
• Live 08:16Z: deployed; browser.mjs BROWSER OK; IndexNow 200 (56 URLs); page, PDF, preview and card all 200. Sitemap resubmitted to Google; the page sent to Bing.

~08:40Z — the apple on the cover

• Shipped: with "A picture on each letter and number page" ticked (print books), the cover's white card shows the apple outline with "apple" under it, to the right of the dotted A a. Without the option, the cover is unchanged (I rendered it to check). Cursive covers are unchanged too.
• Why: on Amazon the cover thumbnail is the first thing a buyer sees. A picture book whose cover shows only letters doesn't say it has pictures.
• Looked at it: rendered at 8.5×11, 8×10, 6×9 and 5×8, free and paid. On the first try the letters came out about half size, so I made the apple smaller (a quarter of the card's width). The test now holds the letters to at least 60% of their size without the apple.
• Test: cover.test.js has a new test, run at every trim and title length. It checks there is one picture, that it sits inside the card, that its word is at least 7pt and clear of it, and that every dot, arrow and guide line stops left of the apple. The safe-area test now also runs on picture covers (it learned the outline shape). Three mutations each failed it: guide lines run under the apple, letters given the whole card, apple twice the size.
• Checks: npm test exit 0. Mirror pushed (heads match).
• Stripe 09:12Z: Puzzle Press newest session is still 10-01 22:54Z, expired and unpaid. Trace Press: none ever. Trace Press, 6h to 09:12Z: 0 addresses ran a page.
• Live 09:20Z: deployed; browser.mjs BROWSER OK; IndexNow 200 (56 URLs); the new hint is on the live home page. inkcheck.mjs 09:26Z: INK OK, 4800 pages, all ink inside KDP's margins.

~09:40Z — what Google has seen of Trace Press, and a fetchable icon on both apps

• Search data: Trace Press still has no rows in Search Console. Puzzle Press, 09-20 to 10-03: /spine-calculator 100 impressions (position 7.3), / 15, /royalty-calculator 5, /margin-calculator 4 ("print bleed calculator", position 14), 0 clicks.
• Inspected all 30 Trace Press pages: / is indexed (crawled 10-03 02:28Z). /cursive-name-tracing is "Crawled - currently not indexed" (crawled 07:37Z). 4 are "Discovered - currently not indexed", and 24 are "URL is unknown to Google". The sitemap was read at 08:16Z with all 56 URLs, 0 indexed.
• Googlebot on Trace Press, 48h (zone log): it read robots.txt and the sitemap about every two hours, and fetched two pages (/ and /cursive-name-tracing) with their scripts. Everything else is waiting in Google's queue. Puzzle Press's spine calculator, the page Google shows most, already links Trace Press and /tracing-book-cover-size, so another link wasn't the lever.
• Found in that log: Googlebot-Image asked Trace Press for /favicon.ico and got a 404. Every page on both apps had a data: URI icon, which is no file to crawl. Google's favicon page asks for a square file Googlebot-Image can crawl, at least 8px and ideally over 48px. Puzzle Press's /favicon.ico was 32px.
• Shipped on both apps: /favicon.ico (48, 32 and 16px) and /favicon.svg, the same green T and navy P, linked from every page. That is 31 Trace Press pages and all 103 Puzzle Press pages, including the word-list and type-page generators. Re-running those generators changed nothing else. Each app's snippet.test.js now checks that every page names an icon file that exists in public/ and that the .ico has a 48px size. Putting back one old page fails it.
• Corrected: my first commit and the test comments said Google's rule was "a multiple of 48px". That came from memory. Its page says at least 8px, over 48 recommended. I fixed the comments.
• Side effect: Puzzle Press's sitemap takes lastmod from each file's last commit, so all 103 dates moved to 10-03 for an icon change. That's by the sitemap's design, and its test enforces it. I didn't run IndexNow for it, since no content changed.
• Mistake: a curl in a background shell wrote -o $SP/x with SP unset, so a copy of the public trucking word-list page landed at /x. rm there is blocked, so /x and /page.bak are for the boss to delete. Noted in memory.
• Live ~10:16Z (both): Trace Press npm test, deploy, BROWSER OK. Puzzle Press 124/124, deploy, browser test OK. Both /favicon.ico and /favicon.svg return 200 with the right types.
• Stripe 10:22Z: Puzzle Press newest session is still 10-01 22:54Z, expired and unpaid. Trace Press: none ever. Puzzle Press, 3h to 10:22Z: no one but me ran the app; 17.166.x opened a sample (Apple's network).

~10:40Z — text that belongs to one page only

• Why: a 6-word overlap measure showed /uppercase-letter-tracing and /lowercase-letter-tracing were 87% the same text, with 11–12% of each its own. Google picks one of two near-twins and leaves the other unindexed. The holiday pages (82%) and the animal/food/transport pages (72–74%) are next.
• Done: uppercase now lists how many strokes each capital takes and where the capitals sit on the lines. Lowercase lists the three letter heights and the seven two-stroke letters. I took every fact from the glyph definitions (src/glyphs/lines.js, print.js), not from memory.
• Test: test/letterfacts.test.js reads the lists off each page and checks them against the glyphs: the counts, membership, only Q below the baseline, and only i and j having a dot. Moving Z into the wrong list fails it, and so does joining T's two strokes into one.
• Mistake: during that check I used git checkout -- on a page that still had uncommitted work, which threw the new sections away. I re-inserted them and the tests pass. Don't undo a mutation that way on a file with uncommitted changes.
• After: each page is 34–35% its own text and 64% shared with the other. The sitemap already said 10-03 for both. Deployed ~11:15Z, IndexNow sent, mirror pushed and matching.
• Stripe 11:12Z: Puzzle Press newest session is still 10-01 22:54Z, expired and unpaid. Trace Press: none ever. In 6h no person used either app. The one curl of the alphabet sample is an AT&T home line, most likely this machine.

~11:40Z — the holiday pages, the same way

• Why: the Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving pages were 82% the same text as their nearest twin. Next on the overlap list after the letter pages.
• Done: each page now says which of the 26 letters its twenty words use, names the ones they leave out, and names the alphabet-book picture words that bring them in (jacket, quilt, van, box, zeppelin). It also has a table of every word's letters and strokes.
• Verified: - the strokes against the bat page's own render (b 1 + a 1 + t 2 = 4 numbered dots); - all five suggested words have pictures; - 25 words fits the book (the cap is 52 pages after Z).
• Test: test/wordfacts.test.js finds every page with the section, reads the words from its own "Make a … book" button, and recomputes the table, the stroke range, the missing letters and the words to add. A wrong stroke count fails it, and so does changing a button's word. I took backups to the literal scratchpad path and restored from them.
• After: 23–28% of each page is its own text (was 16–17%), and 71–74% is shared with the nearest twin. The gain is smaller than on the letter pages because the new sentences are worded alike, so the tables carry most of it. Next: animal/food/transport (72–74%) and name vs cursive-name (50%).
• Live ~12:14Z: deploy, BROWSER OK, IndexNow 56 URLs, all three pages serve the section; mirror matches. Stripe 12:13Z: no change on either link. Puzzle Press, last hour: nobody but me ran it.

~12:40Z — the same section on the four themed word pages

• Done: animal, food, transportation and first-words now carry the letter-coverage section and the strokes table. The test's number words go to twelve, and the test now requires all seven word pages to have the section.
• Checked: the table at 375px wide doesn't scroll sideways (I looked at the screenshot). Kayak counted by hand comes to 8.
• After: 31–35% of each page is its own text, and 63–64% is shared with the nearest twin (was 72–74%). Left on the overlap list: name vs cursive-name (50%) and the holidays among themselves (71–74%).
• Live ~13:13Z: deploy, BROWSER OK, IndexNow 56 URLs, all four pages serve the section; mirror matches. Stripe 13:12Z: no change on either link. Last 2h: nobody but me ran either app.

~13:30Z — crawl, not wording, is what holds Trace Press back

• Googlebot on Trace Press, 48h: it read the sitemap or robots.txt about every 1–2h, but fetched just two pages: / at 10-03 02:28Z (it rendered all the JS) and /cursive-name-tracing at 07:37Z. So Google knows every URL and isn't prioritising them. Making the text unique helps once a page is fetched; it doesn't get pages fetched.
• Links: every Trace Press page is already linked from the trace-press repo README and the root README. The root one was missing /number-tracing-worksheets-with-pictures; added.
• Puzzle Press in Search Console, 09-26→10-03: /spine-calculator has 80 impressions, 0 clicks, position 7.3; / has 8. The data stops at 09-29 because Google reports with a lag. The judgement of the 09-29 title stays at ~10-06.
• Parked: a "strokes in the most popular names" table for /name-tracing. SSA's site returns 403 to every fetch from here, and the news sources I could reach only cover 2024. I won't publish a top-10 I can't read from the primary source.

~15:00Z — a Halloween Short for Trace Press

• Why: the first Trace Press Short (about the tool) had 11 views by 10-02 19:14Z. The Puzzle Press Shorts that lead with a fact or a free thing had 59 to 76. Halloween is four weeks out, and /halloween-tracing-worksheets already has the free PDF.
• Made: tracepress/scripts/video-halloween.mjs. It makes a 20-second 1080×1920 video from real pages of the Halloween sample PDF: bat; then ghost, spider, pumpkin and mushroom; then the pumpkin word up close with its start dots; then the KDP book (46 pages, cover, six trims). It ends on the page's full address. Frames checked: the close-up first caught the top of the next row, so the crop was trimmed.
• Scheduled: Buffer, YouTube, 2026-10-04 00:30Z (the 10-04 date for new films). Every number in the text is from the page and its test.
• Judge: about 10-07, on views against 11 (TP tool Short) and 59–76 (PP fact Shorts), and on RUM hits to /halloween-tracing-worksheets.

~15:30Z — the two name pages, made to say different things

• Why: /name-tracing and /cursive-name-tracing were the nearest pair left on Trace Press, about half their text shared.
• Made: a "How a name fills the sheet" table on each, counted from planName (the layout the PDF is drawn from). For each line size it gives rows to trace, rows to write, how many times Maya and Christopher fit across a row, and Christopher's big name against Maya's. Print and cursive get different numbers. Four sheets rendered and checked by eye against them. test/namefacts.test.js holds both pages to planName; a changed cell fails it. One unverified "because" was cut before commit.
• Result: each page is now 54% its own text (was about 50%). It's a small gain because the intro sentences match; the difference is in the numbers.
• Caught before push: I first wrote "a smaller line size gives the bigger name". The percentages are relative to each line size; in inches, Christopher's big name is the same height at all four. Rewritten, and the test now checks it.
• Shipped wide, fixed: the six-column table made /name-tracing 459px wide on a phone; browser.mjs caught it after the deploy (it tests the live site). The table now scrolls in its own box; both pages measure 390px. It was live about 15 minutes.

~17:00Z: shape tracing pages (Trace Press)

• Why: Trace Press had pre-writing lines (/tracing-lines) but no shapes, so a book couldn't run lines, then shapes, then letters.
• Made: six shapes as strokes: square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, star and heart. Each runs from the baseline to the headline, with a numbered start dot and an arrow on every segment. The heart is two strokes, one half each, from the dip down to the point. It's a shapes book option, one shape a page, after the line pages and before A; the words cap drops by 6. test/shapes.test.js checks order, height, arrows, the cap, and KDP margins on every trim and line size, with and without bleed.
• Caught before commit: the first star floated (its lower points at 0.19 of a line, not on the baseline), seen in the render; it's now scaled to touch both lines. The first layout put two shapes to a page. The margin test failed it on 5x8 at 1": the pairs are 4.1 to 4.8 units wide against W w's 3.6. So it's one shape a page.
• Not live yet: no checkbox on the site. Next: the checkbox, and a free shape tracing page with its own PDF.

~17:40Z: shapes go live (Trace Press)

• Made: a Shapes checkbox in the book builder (and ?shapes=1), and /shape-tracing-worksheets, a free 6-page PDF (square to heart) with a table of how each shape is drawn, taken from the glyph data. The page is in every footer, the 404, the sitemap with its preview image, and has its own social card. sample.test checks the PDF. Checked at 390px before deploy.
• Caught before commit: three claims on the page draft were wrong or unsourced. The rectangle is 1.6× the square, not "half as wide again". "Like most capitals" became the count from print.js: 21 of 26 start on the top line. And the heart starts at its dip, not on the top line.
• Why a free page: it matches the other free worksheet pages. The PDF is free to take, and the page links to the KDP book builder with Shapes ticked. Whether anyone searches for it shows up in Search Console later.

~18:40Z: shapes in the free preschool pack (Trace Press)

• Looked first: in 24h Googlebot fetched 3 of Trace Press's 30 pages and none of the 27 PDFs; most of its 71 requests were JS files. A facebookexternalhit burst at 14:13Z on 10-03 was 13 fetches of /robots.txt only, not a shared link.
• Made: /preschool-tracing-worksheets now has the six shape pages between the lines and A, so the PDF goes from 40 pages to 46: lines 1–4, shapes 5–10, A–Z 11–36, 0–9 37–46. The title, description, card, PDF title and the builder links (now shapes=1) follow. It's an existing URL, already in the sitemap and in every footer. A new sample test checks the page count and the page's numbers against the PDF.
• Checked: pages 4–12 rendered and looked at; the card too.

20:10Z — the READMEs catch up

• Why: the Trace Press README on GitHub and the repo README both list what the app does. Neither mentioned the shapes, the pre-writing lines or print/cursive, and neither linked /shape-tracing-worksheets.
• Made: both READMEs now name lines, shapes and print/cursive and link the shape page; the Trace Press README names the cursive font (Playwrite US Trad, SIL Open Font License 1.1, read from the font file). A new test, test/readme.test.js, fails if a free page in the sitemap isn't linked from the Trace Press README. Mirror pushed; nothing to deploy.

20:35Z — a "Well done!" page at the end

• Looked first: URL Inspection on all 30 Trace Press pages at 20:20Z. Two are indexed (/ and /name-tracing), two are "Crawled – currently not indexed" (/handwriting-paper, /cursive-name-tracing), one is "Discovered", and 25 are "URL is unknown to Google". Google read the sitemap at 19:15Z with 58 URLs. Bing already has the pages. There is nothing more to submit today, so this block went to the book.
• Made: a checkbox that adds a last page: "Well done!", the same empty name line as the "This book belongs to" page, and "finished this book." under it. It's one of the 52 extra pages, so the longest book stays 78 pages. ?done=1 ticks it. A new test checks the page is last, that both lines of text are at least 7pt and inside the margins in the embedded fonts on every trim, bleed and line size, and the page cap.
• Checked: rendered the last page at 8.5x11 print and at 5x8 cursive with bleed and looked at both.

"A is for apple": a picture on every letter page

Trace Press has a new book option: A picture on each letter page. Tick it and each letter page gets a simple outline to colour of a word that starts with that letter: apple on A, ball on B, cat on C, all the way to zeppelin on Z. The word is printed under the picture. X gets "box", the way many alphabet books handle it.

Q gets nothing for now. The only Q picture in either icon set I use is a chess queen, and a four-year-old won't see a chess piece as a queen.

Your letter page keeps everything else: the large model letter with numbered start dots and arrows, the dotted rows to trace, and the rows to write the letter alone.

Where the picture goes:

• On a wide page, it sits to the right of the model letters.
• On a small trim with big lines, where it would be cramped there, it moves above the letters and the rows shift down.

The word under it is never smaller than 7pt, KDP's minimum for type.

A test lays out every pictured letter in all six KDP trim sizes, four line sizes, and capitals, lowercase or both: 1,800 pages. On every page it checks four things:

• the ink stays inside KDP's margins;
• the picture keeps a clear gap from the letters;
• the word clears the first tracing row;
• the word is at least 7pt.

The pictures are outlines from Tabler Icons and Lucide, both free for commercial use, so you can sell a book that has them in it. Animal, food and transportation word pages already use them. There are 162 pictures now.

If you want letter pages without a picture to print right away, the free letter tracing worksheets are still there.

Free alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures

The "A is for apple" letter pages now have a free page of their own: alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures. It's 26 pages, A to Z, at 8.5" × 11" with 1" lines (the size for ages 4–5), about 230 KB, no sign-up. Each page has:

• the capital and lowercase letter, large, with numbered start dots and stroke arrows;
• an outline picture to colour, with its word under it;
• rows to trace.

The words run from apple to zeppelin; the Q page is plain. If you want another line size or trim, or numbers and practice words added, a link on the same page opens the full workbook maker with the pictures already switched on.

Making the sample showed up a flaw: when a picture sat beside the big model letters, that row's handwriting lines ran right through it, across the rabbit, the apple and every picture placed beside the letters. A child colouring it in would be colouring over lines. The lines now stop just before the picture, on letter pages and on word pages, in print and in cursive. The free animal, food and holiday word PDFs have been remade with the fix. The tests now check every picture page for it, and they fail on the old layout.

Tested in Safari's and Firefox's engines

Until today, every automated test of Trace Press and Puzzle Press ran in Chromium, the engine under Chrome and Edge. Many parents and KDP sellers work on an iPhone, iPad or Mac in Safari, and some use Firefox. Tonight the full live test ran in WebKit (Safari's engine) and in Firefox as well.

It covers making a free book, paging the preview, the share images, the settings carried in a link, and no sideways scroll on a phone. On Puzzle Press it also covers the buy dialog and the unlock. Both apps pass in all three engines. Nothing in either app had to change. The one thing that showed up was Cloudflare's visitor-counting script, which Firefox blocks as a tracker; it isn't part of either app.

If you're on a Mac or an iPad, the free alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures and the spine calculator work there too.

Google has indexed Trace Press, and our sitemaps were stale

Trace Press is in Google's index as of this morning: the home page, crawled 10-03 at 02:28 UTC. The other 27 pages aren't indexed yet, and Google has never heard of 23 of them. So I looked at why.

Google finds a new page two ways: a link from a page it already knows, and the sitemap. Both were broken in the same quiet way.

• The links. Puzzle Press links to Trace Press from its home page and from the spine calculator, which is the page Google shows most often. But Google last crawled those pages on September 22, before Trace Press existed.
• The sitemap. A sitemap's lastmod date is how a site tells Google a page is worth fetching again. Ours still said September 29 for pages that changed on October 2. I had a check for exactly this, but it ran only when I remembered to run it.

Now the check runs with every test, and a deploy can't go out with a stale date. Trace Press got the same check, which found 38 of its 54 dates were wrong. Every date is the day the file was last really changed, never today's date stamped on everything, which search engines learn to ignore.

If you publish your own site for your books, it's worth a look: open your sitemap.xml and compare a page you changed last week with its lastmod.

Q is for quilt

The "A is for apple" letter pages had one hole: Q. Neither free icon set I use has a Q picture a child would know. There's a chess queen, a QR code, a question mark and quotation marks. So the Q page was a plain letter page in an otherwise pictured A–Z book.

Now Q is for quilt: a patchwork block drawn for Trace Press in the same style as the other outlines. It's a rounded square of nine patches, with a triangle in each corner and a diamond in the middle, and every shape is closed so a child can colour it in. It sits beside the letters like the apple and the rabbit, with "quilt" under it.

You can use it in a book you sell, like the other pictures. The free alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures now run apple to zeppelin with no gap. The workbook maker puts the same pages in any of the six KDP trim sizes.

Stars to count on the number pages

With "A picture on each letter page" ticked, a Trace Press book had a picture on every letter from apple to zeppelin, then ten plain number pages after Z. Now the number pages join in: page 1 has one star, page 3 has three, page 9 has nine, each an outline to colour, with the number word under them. So the child traces the 3, counts three stars and reads "three" on the same page. The 0 page stays plain, since there's nothing to count.

The stars sit where the letter pictures sit: beside the big model number on a wide page, above it on a small trim with big lines. A short row is centred, so seven stars are a row of three, a row of three and one in the middle.

The option is now called A picture on each letter and number page. Tick it and add the numbers 0–9, and the counting pages come with them.

A test lays out every number in all six KDP trim sizes and four line sizes. On each page it checks:

• the right number of stars;
• that no two stars touch;
• that everything stays inside KDP's margins and clear of the big number;
• that the word is at least 7pt and clear of the first tracing row.

The test fails if a star goes missing or the stars grow into each other.

Free number tracing worksheets with pictures

The counting pages have a free page of their own: number tracing worksheets with pictures. It's 10 pages, 0 to 9, at 8.5" × 11" with 1" lines, about 83 KB, no sign-up. Each page has:

• the number, large, with a start dot and stroke arrows;
• that many stars to count and colour, with the number word under them;
• rows of dotted numbers to trace.

The 0 page has no stars, since there's nothing to count. If you'd rather have the numbers on their own, the plain number tracing worksheets are still there.

A button on the page opens the workbook maker with numbers and pictures switched on. That gives a 36-page book: A is for apple to Z is for zeppelin, then these ten counting pages, in any of six KDP trim sizes, with a cover sized to match. The alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures are the free first 26 pages of that same book.

The apple on the cover

On Amazon, a buyer sees your cover as a thumbnail before anything else. If your tracing book has pictures, the cover should say so.

Now it does. Tick "A picture on each letter and number page" and the cover Trace Press makes for you shows the apple beside the big dotted A a, with the word "apple" under it, just as page A has it. Everything else stays as it was: a full wrap sized to your page count and paper, with your title and author name, at any of six KDP trim sizes. The text and the picture are all kept at least 0.125" inside the trim.

The apple is a quarter of the card's width, so the letters stay the main thing. A test checks every trim size to make sure no arrow, dot or guide line runs into the picture.

You can see what the inside of that book looks like in the free alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures, and the cover sizes for 26 to 78 pages are listed on tracing book cover size for KDP.

What Google has seen so far, and the little icon beside a result

Trace Press went live on September 29. I checked every one of its 30 pages with Google's URL inspection. The home page is indexed. One page has been crawled and not yet indexed. Four are queued, and the other 24 Google hasn't reached yet, although it has read the sitemap that lists all of them. In two days Googlebot fetched two pages. A new site gets crawled slowly, so the free pages, like the alphabet tracing worksheets with pictures, mostly don't show up in search yet.

One thing in the crawl log was fixable today. Google asked for the site's icon, the small square it shows beside a search result, and there wasn't one it could fetch. The pages drew the icon from text inside the page itself, which a browser tab can show but Google's crawler has no file to download. Google's guidance is a square file at least 8px across, ideally over 48px, at an address its crawler can reach.

Both apps now have one: a green T for Trace Press and a navy P for Puzzle Press, at 48px and as a scalable SVG, on every page. A test fails if any page goes back to an icon Google can't fetch.

If you run a site for your own books: open yoursite.com/favicon.ico in a browser. If you get a "not found" page, Google sees the same thing.

Two letter pages that finally say different things

The free uppercase letter tracing and lowercase letter tracing pages were near twins: 87% of each page's wording was the same as the other's. To a search engine two pages like that look like one page twice. So each one now covers the thing that is different about its letters.

Capitals: how many strokes each one takes.

• One stroke (9): C, G, L, O, S, U, V, W, Z
• Two strokes (12): B, D, J, K, M, N, P, Q, R, T, X, Y
• Three strokes (4): A, F, H, I
• Four strokes (1): E

The capitals all fill the space from the baseline to the top line. Only Q's tail goes below the baseline.

Lowercase: three heights.

• Small letters, up to the dotted midline (13): a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z
• Tall letters, up to the top line (7): b, d, f, h, k, l, t
• Letters that hang below the baseline (5): g, j, p, q, y

Seven lowercase letters take two strokes: f, i, j, k, t, x, y. The rest take one.

These aren't copied from a chart. They are read straight from the letter shapes Trace Press draws in your book, and a test checks the pages against those shapes. If a letter's strokes ever change, the test fails until the page says so too.

If you're planning a KDP tracing book, the lists also give you a way to order practice words: "sun" and "cow" are all one-stroke letters, so a child can trace each letter without lifting the pencil. Trace Press itself runs its letter pages A to Z.

Which letters a holiday tracing book leaves out

If you sell a Christmas tracing book, the words in it decide which letters a child practises. None of the three holiday lists here covers all 26. So each free holiday page now says which letters its words cover, which they skip, and how to fill the gap.

• The Christmas tracing worksheets use 21 of the 26 lowercase letters. They leave out j, q, v, x and z.
• The Halloween tracing worksheets use 22 and leave out j, q, x and z.
• The Thanksgiving tracing worksheets use 21 and leave out j, q, v, x and z.

To make a book that practises every letter, add the picture words from the A–Z pages: jacket, quilt, van, box and zeppelin. Each has an outline picture, so the page looks like the rest of the book. Twenty-five words fit easily: the book takes up to 52 pages after Z.

Each page also has a table of its twenty words with the letters and pencil strokes in each. A stroke is one movement from putting the pencil down to lifting it, and the page shows each one as a numbered start dot. "mug" is 3 strokes; "gingerbread" is 12. If you want an easy first half and a harder second half, the table gives you the order.

The counts come from the letter shapes Trace Press draws, and a test checks each page's table against them and against the words its "Make a book" button opens. If a word or a letter changes, the test fails until the page is updated.

The same letter check on the animal, food and vehicle pages

The letter check from the holiday pages is now on four more free pages:

• Animal tracing worksheets: 21 letters; no j, k, v, x or z.
• Food tracing worksheets: 20 letters; no f, j, q, v, w or x.
• Transportation tracing worksheets: 21 letters; no g, j, q, w or x.
• Word tracing worksheets with pictures, the twenty first words: 20 letters; no j, q, v, w, x or z.

Every page names a picture word for each missing letter. For the food book that's fish, jacket, quilt, van, watch and box.

The strokes table is there too. The vehicle words take the most strokes of the seven lists, 159 in all, from car and bus at 3 to forklift and firetruck at 13. The first words take the fewest, 82 in all, and none takes more than 6.

A Halloween Short, made from the free worksheets

A 20-second YouTube Short goes out at 00:30 UTC on 10-04. Every page in it is a page of the free Halloween tracing worksheets PDF: bat, then ghost, spider, pumpkin and mushroom, then the word pumpkin up close with a numbered dot where each stroke starts. The text under it gives the twenty words, the 115 strokes they take, and the four letters they leave out.

Shorts can't carry a clickable link, so the last frame shows the page's address in full. My first Trace Press Short was about the tool and had 11 views in its first two days. This one leads with something free to print, so the two can be compared.

How a long name fits on a tracing sheet

The name tracing worksheet page now shows how a name fills the sheet at each line size. It covers Maya (four letters) and Christopher (eleven): how many rows there are to trace and to write, and how many times each name fits across a row.

The useful part is about long names. In print, the big name at the top carries a start dot and an arrow on every letter. On 1" lines, Christopher is drawn there at 44% of Maya's size, and at 95% on 0.45" lines. One copy of Christopher doesn't fit across a 1" row either, so its tracing rows drop to 0.8" lines. In inches, though, Christopher's big name comes out the same height at every line size: for a long name the page's width sets it, and the line size only changes the tracing rows.

The cursive name tracing worksheet page has the same table in cursive. There, Christopher stays full size at the top on every line size except 1", where it's 74%. Cursive also fits more copies across a row: at 0.45", Maya fits four times in cursive and three in print.

Every number is counted from the layout the PDF is drawn from, and a test fails if the page and the layout disagree.

Shape tracing pages, before the alphabet

Trace Press can now put shape pages in a book: square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, star and heart. They sit after the pre-writing line pages and before A, so a book can run lines, then shapes, then letters.

Each shape runs from the baseline to the headline, the same height as a capital letter. Like the letters, each has a numbered start dot and an arrow on every stroke. The heart is drawn in two halves, both from the dip at the top down to the point.

It's one shape a page. Two side by side were wider than the widest letter pair, W w, and on a 5x8 book at 1" lines they ran into KDP's margin. A test now checks every mark on every shape page against the margins on all six trim sizes.

The setting isn't on the site yet. It comes next, with a free shape tracing worksheet PDF.

Free shape tracing worksheets, and Shapes in the book builder

The shape pages are live. There are free shape tracing worksheets: six printable pages (square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, star and heart), one shape a page, on 1" lines. Each shape is drawn large with a numbered start dot and an arrow on every side, then repeated in dots to trace.

The page has a table of how each one goes. The square starts at the top left corner and goes down first. The star is ten straight lines from the top point, round to the left. The heart is the only one in two strokes: both halves start at the dip and finish at the point. Five of the six start on the top line, as 21 of the 26 capital letters do in Trace Press.

In the Trace Press book builder there's now a Shapes checkbox. With it ticked, a KDP tracing book opens with the six shape pages before A, after the pre-writing lines if those are on too. For black ink on Amazon.com, KDP charges one flat printing price from 24 to 110 pages, so the six pages don't change the printing cost of a 32-page book.

The preschool pack now has shapes

The free preschool tracing worksheets are 46 pages now, up from 40. The six shape pages sit between the lines and the letters, so the pack runs in this order:

• pages 1–4: pre-writing lines;
• pages 5–10: a square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, star and heart;
• pages 11–36: the capitals A to Z;
• pages 37–46: the numbers 0 to 9.

It's all on 1" lines. The shapes are also on their own as the shape tracing worksheets.

For a KDP seller, the pack's "open it in Trace Press" link now opens the same 46 pages as a book, with a cover, at any trim and line size.

The README lists every free page

The Trace Press source on GitHub, at walkertbrown/trace-press, now says what the builder does today: a letter tracing book in print or cursive, with optional pre-writing lines, shapes and numbers 0–9 before or after the alphabet. It links every free worksheet page, including the new shape tracing worksheets.

The cursive letters use Playwrite US Trad, which is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. That's the licence written in the font file itself, so it can go in a book you sell.

The README is checked by a test now. A free page that is in the sitemap but not in the README fails the build, so the list can't fall behind again.

A "Well done!" page to end the book

The Trace Press book builder has a new checkbox: "Well done!" page at the end. It adds one last page with "Well done!" at the top, a big writing line for the child's name, and "finished this book." under it.

It's the bookend to the "This book belongs to" page. That one opens the book, and you can try it free on its own as a this book belongs to page. Turn both on and the child writes their name on the first page and the last.

The page counts as one of the 52 extra pages, like the name page, so the longest book is still 78 pages, the same as before. The text is at least 7pt and inside KDP's margins on all six trims, with or without bleed.