1 inch grid paper, printable A4 sheet

What this sheet is

The coarsest squared ruling drawn here: one inch, which is 25.4 mm, on A4. At that pitch the writing area holds 7 columns and 10 rows — 70 squares in total, drawn with 19 ruled lines, on a sheet of 210 by 297 millimetres.

Seventy is few enough that the sheet is a layout rather than a grid. Each square is a space to work inside, not a unit in a count: one square to an item, a frame, a day, a plot. A sheet of 70 cells behaves more like a table than like graph paper, and it is worth using it that way.

The ruling is centred in the writing area, and here the centring is the most visible decision on the page. With 7 columns across, the leftover fraction of a square is a wide strip of paper. Halved and given to both margins it becomes a border; pushed against one edge it looks as though the printer ran out of room.

Ruled in inches

The pitch is an inch because it was set as an inch. 25.4 mm is what an inch measures, not a metric spacing that happens to sit near one, and every line is placed from the inch rather than from a converted figure carried forward seven times across the sheet.

The measuring bar in the foot margin is printed in inches here for the same reason. Anyone checking an inch grid has an inch rule within reach, and a bar that has to be converted before it can be read is a bar that does not get read.

Printing it at true size

This is the pitch with the most to lose. A print dialogue set to Fit to page scales an A4 sheet onto US Letter at 94.1 per cent, and the reduction is taken out of the spacing in proportion — so an inch square, being the largest square drawn here, gives up more actual width than any other ruling on the site. At 94.1 per cent an inch square measures 23.895 mm.

Set the scale to 100 per cent, or Actual size, and switch off anything that offers to fit the sheet to the printable area. Then put a rule on the bar in the foot margin, which is drawn at a stated length and labelled with it, before you draw anything measured on the squares.

What else the bench will set

An inch grid is a frame, so the extras count for more here than on a fine ruling. Name and date lines across the head turn the sheet into a form; the red margin rule down the left gives the first column something to sit against. Both are switches on the page and both redraw at once.

The spacing control runs down to the finer inch pitches and across to the metric ones. Paper can be A5, A3, US Letter or Legal, the sheet upright or landscape, the ink grey, blue or black. A heavier line every fifth is offered but does little at this pitch, with only 7 columns to divide. Take the sheet as a PDF, a PNG or an SVG; it is drawn in this browser and stored nowhere.