Calendar With Lines to Write On

Lines per cell

None, two, three or four

Where they sit

The lower two thirds, under the date

Weight

Hairlines, in the palest grey on the sheet

On a dated sheet

Only days belonging to the month are ruled

Four is the most a cell will take

The control offers none, two, three or four. They divide the space under the date evenly between them, so four sit closer together than two rather than reaching further down the cell. On A4 four is still a comfortable hand; on A5 the cell is too shallow for four and two is the setting that will actually be written on.

They are drawn at the thinnest weight on the sheet, in its palest grey. A writing line darker than the writing is a line you keep reading instead of the note, so these are meant to be caught out of the corner of the eye and then ignored.

On a dated sheet only the days belonging to the month are ruled. The leading and trailing cells belong to the months either side and stay plain, so the shape of the month is still legible when the grid is full of lines. Leave the dates out altogether and every cell is ruled, because there are no neighbours left to distinguish.

The week sheet reads the same control differently, adding two to whatever number you choose, because a band running across the page has a good deal more depth to fill than a square cell has.

Printing it

Faint hairlines are the first part of a sheet a tired printer loses, so print at 100% on a normal quality setting rather than draft or toner-saving. In the PDF and the SVG the lines are vector strokes and hold their weight at whatever size the paper is set to; in the PNG they are fixed at twice the sheet’s own scale. A4 is 210 × 297 mm; A5, at 148 × 210 mm, leaves each cell close to a third shallower, which is why four lines stop working there.