1/4 inch graph paper, printable A4 sheet

What this sheet is

A quarter-inch squared ruling on A4. A quarter of an inch is 6.35 mm, and the writing area takes 29 columns by 43 rows at that pitch, which is 1,247 squares drawn with 74 ruled lines. The paper is the usual 210 by 297 millimetres; only the grid on it is imperial.

The ruling is centred in the writing area, so the part of a square that will not fit is halved and given to each margin rather than left standing against one edge. At this size the leftover passes unnoticed when it is split and is quite obvious when it is not.

Ruled in inches, not converted

The pitch is a quarter of an inch first and 6.35 mm second. That is not the same thing as a metric spacing rounded off for tidiness and given an imperial label, which is what a converted grid amounts to. Every line is positioned from the inch, which is why the twenty-ninth column sits where an inch rule says it should rather than a fraction of a line away from it.

The measuring bar in the foot margin follows the same logic and is printed in inches on this sheet. Anyone checking a sheet ruled in inches has an inch rule to hand, and asking them to convert first is exactly the step where a scaled print gets waved through as a true one.

Printing it at true size

Set the print scale to 100 per cent, or Actual size, and refuse Fit to page. Fit to page is not a formatting preference here, it is a change to the measurement: A4 dropped onto US Letter is scaled to 94.1 per cent, and a quarter-inch square arrives as 5.97 mm.

That figure is worth reading twice. It is not a quarter of an inch, and it is not a round number of millimetres either, so a scaled sheet has stopped being usable in either system while looking exactly like graph paper. Lay a rule on the bar in the foot margin before you trust the print.

What else the bench will set

The bench holds the ruling and lets everything else move. The other inch pitches sit on the spacing control alongside the metric ones, so a quarter-inch sheet and a half-inch sheet are one click apart rather than two pages apart. The paper can be changed to A5, A3, US Letter or Legal, the sheet turned to landscape, and the ink set to grey, blue or black.

A red margin rule, name and date lines, and a heavier line every fifth square can each be switched on. On a quarter-inch grid the heavy fifth line is the one extra worth trying first, because it gives a long count something to land on. Take the result as a PDF, a PNG or an SVG. The drawing is made in this browser and goes nowhere else.