A5 planner sheets

The same week on smaller paper

595.28 by 419.53 points, landscape, seven columns, Monday to Sunday. It carries the same title as the larger sheet, Weekly planner, Monday to Sunday, and it is that layout worked out again for the smaller page rather than the A4 sheet shrunk on a photocopier. The file is 4,255 bytes.

210 by 297 millimetres and 148 by 210

What changes at this size

Two things change, and both are losses rather than features.

• Fewer lines. The A5 sheet is drawn with fifty-four ruled lines. The A4 landscape version of the same week has seventy-one.
• No box. The A4 sheet carries one box. The A5 sheet has none, and that is also why it prints nine words where the A4 sheet prints ten.

What does not change is the day names. All seven print in full at this size; the columns are not narrow enough to force Mon, Tue and Wed onto the page. Where a column is too narrow to hold a name, the name is shortened rather than the lettering being made smaller, because smaller type is smaller everywhere and the heading is the part of the sheet a reader needs least. That threshold is not reached here.

Why it is drawn again rather than scaled

Reducing an A4 page to A5 on a printer takes everything down in one proportion, the lettering with it. This sheet is set out at its own size instead, which is why the line count differs rather than the same seventy-one lines being squeezed into a shorter page. The line spacing is chosen for the paper it is on, not inherited from a bigger sheet.

Black only

Everything on the sheet is black. A form whose meaning is carried by colour comes out of a mono printer with the meaning gone: the colours land as grey and the key stops working. Nothing here depends on colour, so the sheet prints the same on any machine, and there is no coloured panel to eat ink on a page that exists to be written on.

Written in the browser

The PDF is written on this page, in the browser, byte by byte, from the measurements the controls hold. Nothing is uploaded and no file is fetched: the A5 sheet is not a stored copy of the A4 one, it is the same drawing run again with A5 as the paper. Changing the paper does not swap in another file, it writes a new one, so the number of lines that fit is a result of the size rather than a decision taken once and left.