Print paper: lined, squares, dots, handwriting lines or music staves

The five kinds

• Lined: lines across the sheet, from 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch apart, with a margin line down the left side if you want one.
• Squares (graph paper): squares from 5 mm to 1 inch, set in the middle of the sheet.
• Dots: a dot where the corners of the squares would be, 5 mm, 1/4 inch or 1 cm apart.
• Handwriting lines: rows made of a line at the top, a dashed line through the middle and a line at the bottom, from 1/2 inch to 1 inch tall, with half a row left empty under each one.
• Music staves: sets of five lines, with the lines 2, 2.5 or 3 mm apart, and room between the sets.
• A link to a kind: an address that ends in the kind, like /print-paper/#squares, opens on it. The five endings are #lines, #squares, #dots, #hand and #music.

How the page measures

• The paper: Letter (8.5 by 11 inches, which is 215.9 by 279.4 mm) or A4 (210 by 297 mm), upright or sideways.
• The edge: the page leaves 1 cm empty on every side, because many printers cannot print up to the edge of the sheet.
• Whole numbers only: inside the page every measure is a whole number of thousandths of a millimeter (an inch is 25,400 of them), so no measure is rounded.
• An example: upright Letter paper with lines 8 mm apart has 32 lines, or 30 with a line for Name and Date at the top. With 1/4 inch squares it has 30 squares across and 40 down. Upright A4 paper with 5 mm squares has 38 across and 55 down.
• Print at 100%. If the print window is set to Fit to page or Shrink, the whole sheet comes out a little smaller and so does every square. Hold a ruler to the first sheet before you count on the measure.

Every time the page is built, a program draws all 216 sheets the page can make and measures each one: that every line is inside the sheet, that the spaces are exactly the size asked for, and that no more lines, squares, dots, rows or staves would fit, counted a second way by adding one at a time. It also checks 15 sheets counted by hand.

What this page does not do

• It does not follow any school’s or any country’s rules for ruled paper or for handwriting lines. The sizes are plain measures; pick the one that looks like the paper you were asked for.
• It draws no clefs, notes or bar lines, no letters to trace, and no numbers along the squares.
• It cannot see your printer. A printer may shrink the page, cut off an edge or print a little off. It has been tried in one browser’s print preview (Chromium, saved as PDF), where the sheets came out one to a page and the right size; it has not been tried on paper from a real printer.
• It does not make other papers: no Legal or A5 sheets, no slanted or triangle grids, no colors to choose.
• It keeps nothing. Your choices are gone when you close or reload the page.
• Ink and paper cost money too. The Light setting uses the least ink, and both sides of a sheet can be printed.