Quire: ruled paper drawn to size

What the press does

Quire draws ruled paper to order. A sheet here is described by three things — the ruling, the spacing, and the paper — and the press draws it from those and gives you a PDF, a PNG or an SVG.

The figures are the point of the exercise. Squared paper at 5 mm on A4 comes out at 38 columns by 55 rows, which is 2,090 squares; the same 5 mm ruling on Letter gives 39 columns by 51 rows, or 1,989. Whatever fraction of a square is left over at the end of a run is split between the two margins rather than piling up against one edge, so the ruling sits centred in the writing area.

Ten rulings

• Squared — a full grid. Metric at 5 mm and 10 mm; imperial at 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 inch, which are 3.175, 6.35, 12.7 and 25.4 mm.
• Lined — 8 mm, and a wide ruling at 8.7 mm. Upright, or landscape with the lines running the long way of the paper.
• Dot grid — 5 mm, the grid reduced to its intersections, with no ruled lines at all.
• Isometric — 5 mm, ruled at sixty degrees, for drawing solids on a flat sheet.
• Music staves — five-line staves at a stave height of 7 mm, fifty ruled lines to the A4 page.
• Penmanship — bands at 15.9 mm, each with a dotted midline through it.
• Cornell notes — a cue column, twenty-nine ruled lines at 8 mm, and a summary band across the foot.
• Storyboard — six frames at 16:9.
• Number line — a rule ticked at every step, with the value printed under the tick. Up to five copies to a sheet, so one print can be cut apart. Offered blank as well, the ticks kept and the numerals dropped for the reader to write in.
• Coordinate grid — a square lattice with two heavier axes crossing at the origin and the units numbered along both, four quadrants out to 10.

Those last two are different in kind from the rest: they arrive ready-made, with their numbers already printed on the sheet, where every other ruling here is blank and you set it yourself.

Drawn in your browser, not scanned

Two things separate this from most sources of printable paper, and both are worth stating plainly.

The first is that the sheet is drawn, in your own browser, from the measurement you set. It is not a scan of ruled paper and it is not a picture of one. There is no cupboard of pre-made files here: the file is generated on the spot, when you ask for it, from the numbers on the page. Because the drawing happens on your own machine, nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.

A bar you can put a ruler on

The second is that every sheet carries a short measuring bar in the foot margin, printed at a stated length. It is there for one reason: so the print can be checked against a ruler after the fact. If the bar matches the length printed beside it, the sheet came out at true size and every spacing on it is the spacing it claims. If it comes out short, the print dialogue scaled the page — which is the one thing that reliably goes wrong with printed ruled paper, and the one thing worth reading about before you print a stack.

Finding the sheet you want

Twenty-five sheets are published, each with a ruling, a spacing and a paper already set, and the site’s own index lists them. Start from the ruling, then the spacing; if the sheet you land on is close but not exact, change it where you are. Every published sheet is a bench as well as a page. The spacing, the paper — A4, A5, Letter or Legal — the orientation, the ink, a red margin rule, name-and-date lines and a heavier line every fifth are all set on the page itself, and the sheet is redrawn as you set them.