Meal planner

The sheet on this page is titled Meal planner, 7 days, 3 meals, and the title is a fair description of the whole of it. Seven day columns run across the paper, three meal rows run down, and every cell is left empty. The site draws the ruling. What goes inside the ruling is not the site’s business.

The grid

Day columns are set out Monday to Sunday, in that order, across the long edge of an A4 page in landscape. The meal rows read breakfast, lunch and dinner from the top down. Meal rows are available from one to four, and the order they appear in is fixed: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack.

The drawing is made of fifteen ruled lines and carries twelve words, those being the day names, the meal labels and the sheet’s own title. There are no tick boxes on the meal sheet and no shaded squares anywhere on it. The page measures 841.89 by 595.28 points, which is A4 landscape, and the planner is one sheet.

Day names when the columns are narrow

On this sheet the day names print in full. Where a setting narrows the columns, the names are abbreviated rather than set in smaller type. The reasoning is that a column heading is rarely read as a word at all. It answers one question, which is which column is this, and a short name at a legible size answers that better than a full name shrunk until it has to be squinted at.

Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat and Sun, and the change happens below 19.5 millimetres of column

it can be set to 5, 6 or 7

Black only

Every line and every word prints black. None of the meaning is carried by colour, and that is a decision rather than an economy. A form whose meaning depends on colour comes out of a mono printer with its meaning removed: the tint that separated one meal row from the next arrives as the same grey as the tint that marked off the weekend, and the reader is left holding a grid with a decoration missing and a distinction gone. A grid drawn in black survives a printer with one cartridge, and a photocopy of a photocopy.

Where the file comes from

The PDF is written in the browser, byte by byte, by the site itself. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is fetched from a stock library, and no ready made template is stored anywhere on the site. The finished file for this sheet is 2,336 bytes. Twenty five sheets on the site are made the same way, from geometry rather than from a document somebody drew once and filed.

What is not drawn here

Two neighbouring requests are answered with a no.

• A month grid is not offered as a meal planner. A month grid is a calendar, and it is treated as a calendar rather than reissued under a planner name.
• A meal planner laid out for a named illness is not drawn at all. The layout would be easy. The contents are not ours to suggest.

The second of those is the same limit the ordinary sheet already works under. It prints three row labels and seven day names. Everything else on it is ruled space, and the site has no view on what fills the space, no view on how many meals a week should contain, and nothing to say about what any of it is for.