Why this exists

Pencil Ready started as a tool for one 5th grader learning long division in Oslo. Her dad — a software engineer — raised an eyebrow at modern math-teaching methods that skewed heavily digital and embraced AI. He grew up learning math step by step, skill by skill, reinforced through repetition. Wanting the same practice surface for his daughter, he turned to online worksheet generators. Most of these were loaded down with ads, required users to log in, or had restrictive usage limits. They weren't designed to meet what seemed like a clear and worthy mission:

Make math drilling simple and accessible for everyone.

Pencil Ready is the answer: a single page that generates a clean, printable PDF on demand, with no ads, no cookies, no login, and no usage limits.

So, a guy who loves math built what he needed to help his kid learn fundamental skills, but also to support other parents who need an online math resource that just works.

Using the worksheets

The PDFs you download from Pencil Ready are released under Creative Commons BY 4.0. In plain English:

• Print as many as you need. A class set, a stack for the staff room, a copy for every student in your school — all fine.
• Share them. Post on your classroom site, drop into Google Classroom, hand off to a colleague, email to a parent.
• Edit them. Cross out problems, scribble notes in the margins, scan and mark up. Once you print a worksheet, it's yours to mark up however you like.
• Use them at work. Tutors, after-school programs, paid courses, printed workbooks — yes, this includes commercial use.

The one thing the license asks: if you republish the worksheets — on a website, in a workbook, as part of a curriculum package — credit Pencil Ready and link back to pencilready.com. For everyday classroom use — print, hand out, recycle — there's nothing else to think about.

What's inside

Every worksheet is generated server-side by a Rust program that hands a curated description to Typst, a modern typesetting system. Typst does the heavy lifting of laying out digits, operators, brackets, and fraction bars at pixel-perfect print quality. The result is embedded, subsetted fonts and vector geometry — same output whether you print it on A4 in Oslo or US Letter in Indiana.

The UI you're using now is Astro with a small React island for the interactive configurator. Each worksheet type has its own URL that's pre-rendered to HTML at build time, so search engines (and any browser with JavaScript turned off) can still read the page.

Open source

The entire project — Rust generators, Typst templates, Astro frontend — lives at github.com/kung-foo/pencil-ready. The source code is released under the MIT license — clone it, self-host it, fork it, or file an issue if you spot a bug or have a suggestion. PRs for new worksheet types are welcome.

What's next

The worksheet catalog grows when a new topic comes up in the curriculum. Things currently on the list: decimal arithmetic, order of operations, negative numbers, area and perimeter, unit conversion.

Credits

Built with Rust, Typst, Astro, React, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, and fly.io. Fonts: Roboto Slab (body), Fira Mono / Fira Code (digits), Fira Math (operators), STIX Two Text (variables). The rainbow heart is by my daughter.