Printable graph paper, 5 mm squares, A4

What this sheet is

Squared paper ruled at 5 mm, centre to centre, on A4: 210 by 297 millimetres. The ruling fills the writing area with 38 columns and 55 rows, which is 2,090 squares, and it takes 95 ruled lines to draw them. The spacing is the figure the file is built from rather than a description of it. Every line is placed outwards from the measurement, so a square on the printed sheet is 5 mm because that is what it was set to, not because it came out about right.

The ruling is centred in the writing area. A 5 mm pitch will not divide the page into a whole number of squares, and the fraction left over has to go somewhere; it is split between the two margins instead of piling up against one edge. At this spacing the leftover is small, but an uncentred sheet still reads as a mistake even when every square on it is exactly right.

What 5 mm is for

Five millimetres is the spacing at which a square stops being background and starts being a unit. It is small enough to hold a single character or a single plotted point, and coarse enough to count across without losing the place. With 2,090 of them on the sheet there is room to set an origin near the middle and still have working space on all four sides.

It is also the spacing where the size itself matters. Counting squares works at any pitch; measuring in them does not. A drawing laid out at one square to the unit is only to scale for as long as the square is 5 mm, which is what the next section is about.

Printing it at true size

The commonest way to end up with the wrong sheet is not a bad file. It is a print dialogue set to Fit to page. Asked to put A4 onto US Letter it scales the whole sheet to 94.1 per cent, and the ruling goes with it: 5 mm arrives as 4.7 mm. Nothing about the result looks wrong. The squares are still square and the lines are still even; the sheet is simply not 5 mm paper any more.

Set the scale to 100 per cent, or Actual size, and switch off anything offering to fit the page to the printable area. Then check the print rather than the preview. The bar across the foot margin is drawn at a stated length and labelled with it, so a ruler laid along it settles the question in a second. If it reads short, the dialogue scaled the sheet.

What else the bench will set

This page opens on 5 mm A4, but the sheet is a starting position rather than a fixed file. The spacing can be moved to any of the other pitches, in millimetres or in inches. 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.

Four extras sit on top of the ruling: a red margin rule down the left, name and date lines across the head, a heavier line every fifth to break the count into blocks, and the measuring bar itself, which can come off once a printer is known to be honest. The finished sheet comes as a PDF, a PNG or an SVG. All of it is drawn in the browser on this page; nothing is uploaded and nothing is kept.