1/2 inch squared paper, printable A4

What this sheet is

A half-inch squared ruling on A4. Half an inch is 12.7 mm, and at that pitch the writing area takes 14 columns and 21 rows: 294 squares, drawn with 37 ruled lines, on a sheet of 210 by 297 millimetres.

Two hundred and ninety-four is a number you can hold in your head. It is a grid you can count across without marking your place, and one where each square is large enough to carry something on its own — a value, a letter, a stitch, a room on a plan — instead of acting as background to it.

The ruling is centred in the writing area. With only 14 columns across, the fraction of a square that will not fit is a large share of one, and where it goes is not a detail: split between the two margins it reads as a border, and left at one edge it reads as a misprint.

Ruled in half inches

The pitch is half an inch, not a metric spacing wearing an imperial label. The lines are positioned from the inch and 12.7 mm is the consequence rather than the input, which is why the fourteenth column lands where an inch rule says it should instead of drifting a fraction of a line further out with each square.

The measuring bar in the foot margin is printed in inches on this sheet for the same reason. A reader with an inch rule can check the print without doing arithmetic first, and arithmetic is where a scaled sheet gets through.

Printing it at true size

Set the scale to 100 per cent or Actual size, and turn off Fit to page. Left on, and asked to put A4 onto US Letter, it scales the sheet to 94.1 per cent and takes the ruling with it: the square comes off the printer at 94.1 per cent of a half inch, looking entirely normal while doing so.

Coarse rulings hide this better than fine ones, which is the trap in it. There are only 14 squares across the sheet, so there is no long run of them to make the shortfall obvious — the paper just quietly stops being half-inch paper. Lay a rule on the bar in the foot margin rather than judging by eye.

What else the bench will set

The spacing can be moved up or down the list, in inches or in millimetres, without leaving the page. The stock can be A5, A3, US Letter or Legal, the sheet can be turned to landscape, and the ink can be grey, blue or black.

A red margin rule, name and date lines, a heavier line every fifth and the measuring bar are each optional. At half an inch the heavy fifth line is a strong division rather than a quiet one, so it is worth looking at the drawing on screen before committing it to paper. Output is a PDF, a PNG or an SVG, drawn in the browser here and kept nowhere.