Squared and lined paper to print

The sizes are the real ones, not eyeballed

Squared paper that is half a millimetre out is no use at all, so the sizes in here were not picked by looking at a picture. The squares are 10, 5 and 4 mm: the big one of the first school year, the classic half centimetre and the fine one of secondary school. The Italian school rulings have a name and a pitch, and these are they: A, for the first two years, has a 10 mm pitch with a 4 mm inner rail, B of the third year has an 8 mm pitch, C of the fourth and fifth year and 1R of secondary school both have a 7 mm pitch and the only difference between them is the red margin, which 1R does not have.

There is one number the sources do not give, and it has to be said rather than hidden: of ruling B everybody writes «reduced rail», and nobody writes by how much. Here it is 3 mm, that is the proportion of ruling A carried over to the 8 mm pitch, and the page says so as soon as you pick that ruling. A derived number that is declared can be checked; a derived number that is kept quiet looks like a real measurement without being one.

The fault is not the PDF, it is the print window

The real trouble is not in the file, it is in the moment you print it: nearly every driver arrives with fit to page already on, and to stay inside the printable area it shrinks everything by three or four per cent. A 5 mm square comes out at 4.8, graph paper stops being graph paper, and nobody notices, because two tenths of a millimetre cannot be seen by eye.

That is why at the bottom of the sheet there is a sample line 100 mm long, with a tick every centimetre: you measure it with a ruler before using the sheet. If it does not add up, look in the print window for the scale setting and put it at 100 per cent, or «actual size»; in Acrobat it is called «actual size» too. The line always prints in black and always at its own size, even when the lines of the sheet are pale grey: a reference that fades along with everything else could no longer be measured.

What is inside, besides the squares

There are also the sheets nobody has at home the night before: graph paper, with the one millimetre grid and the fives and tens picked out more heavily; isometric paper for drawing in three dimensions, made of real equilateral triangles and not of approximate diamonds; music staves; and the Cornell layout, which divides the page into a question column, a note area and a summary band.

You choose the paper size between A4 and Letter, the orientation, the colour and the weight of the lines, and how much extra margin to leave on the left for binding or for the holes of a ring folder. If instead you need the exact sizes of every paper format, the page is Paper sizes: all dimensions. And if you want to put two sheets on one side to save paper, the step is Multiple PDF pages per sheet.

What it does not do, and why

It does not print: it makes the PDF, you launch the printing, and that is on purpose, because the print window is exactly where the shrinking has to be turned off. It does not draw the clef of the staff, because that would need a music font embedded in the file, and a crooked clef is worse than no clef: the staff stays empty and the clef gets written by hand, as in a notebook.

And it does not add the vertical spacing lines that some first year notebooks have, because on those the sources agree neither on the pitch nor on whether they are there at all, and inventing them would mean printing a notebook that does not exist. For the other study sheets the site already builds there are Concept map from an outline and Timeline from a list of dates.