Meal planner with a shopping list

The sheet is titled Meal planner, 7 days, 3 meals, with a shopping list. It is the seven day, three meal grid with one addition: a ruled panel for a list, printed on the same single sheet of A4 landscape.

The panel takes its width out of the grid

This is the part worth knowing before the file is written. The panel does not float above the grid, and it does not print on a second page. It takes its width out of the day columns. The columns on this sheet are narrower than the columns on the plain planner by exactly as much as the panel occupies. That is a trade rather than a free extra, and the site states it here rather than leaving it to be found out at the printer. One sheet is the constraint, and the panel has to come from somewhere.

60.1 millimetres, which is 22 per cent of the printable width; the day columns fall from 36.8 millimetres to 27.7

twenty-eight

What is drawn

• Forty four ruled lines, against fifteen on the same planner without the panel.
• One drawn box, which is the panel itself.
• Thirteen words in total, covering the day names, the meal labels and the sheet’s own titling.
• No tick boxes and no shaded squares.
• A page of 841.89 by 595.28 points, A4 landscape, one sheet.
• A finished file of 4,035 bytes.

Narrow columns and short day names

Because the panel narrows the grid, the day headings matter more here than on the plain sheet. Where the columns are narrow the day names are abbreviated rather than set in smaller type. A heading has to identify a column rather than be read as prose, and a short word at a readable size does that where a full word at a reduced size does not. On the sheet described here the day names are set in full.

Black ink, and a file made in the browser

The panel, the grid and the words all print black. A list panel that marked itself off with a coloured rule would arrive from a mono printer as a rectangle of undifferentiated grey, which is a worse outcome than never having used colour, because the reader cannot see what was lost. The PDF is written in the reader’s browser as the controls are adjusted, so the sheet on screen and the sheet in the file are one drawing rather than two copies that can drift apart. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is licensed from anyone, and no template is hosted: twenty five sheets on the site are drawn by the same geometry.

What the panel does not do

The panel is ruled space with nothing printed in it. The site does not suggest items, does not group anything by aisle, and holds no opinion about what a week of meals contains or what it ought to cost. It draws lines to write on, and the writing is the reader’s.

Nor is there a month version of this sheet. A month grid is a calendar, and calendars are drawn as calendars elsewhere rather than renamed as meal planners.