Christmas planner sheet

The Christmas sheet is a sectioned checklist. Its heading reads Checklist, 4 lines across 1 sheet, and at the setting the page opens on it holds seven rules, four boxes, four squares and three words on a single sheet of A4. The file comes to 1,512 bytes.

Headings, boxes, blank lines

Christmas is a season of small unrelated jobs that arrive in bunches, so the sheet is sectioned rather than run as one long column. A heading, then the tick boxes belonging under it, then the next heading. The sections are part of the sheet and not part of this page, and the preview beside the controls shows them as drawn. As early as you like (four items); Six weeks before (four items); Two weeks before (four items); The last week (four items). Across one sheets the press rules 32 lines, sixteen of them carrying a printed item and the rest left blank for your own.

Blank ruled lines close every section. Households differ more at Christmas than at any other time of year, and a list that ends flush at its last printed item has no room for the neighbour who always gets a tin, the cousin who has gone vegetarian since last December, or the parcel that has to be posted before the last collection date. The blank lines take those in whatever hand writes them.

A long section carries on rather than being pushed across

When a section grows past the space left on the sheet, the drawing does not move the whole section to the next page. It runs the section down to the foot of the sheet, breaks between two items rather than splitting one, and resumes at the top of the following sheet under the same heading, marked (continued).

Both halves of that behaviour are deliberate. Shifting a whole section across would leave the first sheet part empty, and a section longer than one sheet would spill regardless, so nothing would have been gained. Repeating the heading without the mark would be worse: two identical headings on consecutive sheets read as a misprint, and the reader loses time deciding whether a page has failed to come out of the tray.

No calendar

A dated December grid is a calendar rather than a checklist, and calendars are not among the stock here. This sheet does not print dates, weeks or a month view. It prints headings, boxes and lines, and any date that matters goes on the line beside the item it belongs to.

Black only

The sheet prints in black. Colour used to separate one group of tasks from another survives only on a colour printer, and a great many of the machines this sheet will meet in December are not colour printers. A form that relies on a red heading and a green heading is a form that arrives with its groups collapsed together. Rule weight, spacing and heading position do the same work and come through on anything.

Drawn in the browser

Nothing is hosted and nothing is licensed. The geometry for this sheet was written for this site, it runs in the reader’s own browser, and the PDF is put together byte by byte there before the download starts. Adjusting a control redraws the sheet and rewrites the file; there is no second copy anywhere that could fall out of step with what is on screen.