Moving checklist sheet

The moving sheet is a sectioned checklist on A4. Its heading reads Checklist, 4 lines across 1 sheet, and at the setting the page opens on the drawing lays down seven rules, four boxes, four squares and three words. The finished file is 1,512 bytes, which is smaller than most of the icons on the page that made it.

How the sheet is divided

A move is a job that arrives in parts, and a single unbroken column of tick boxes hides that fact. The sheet is sectioned instead: a heading, the boxes that sit under it, then the next heading, down the sheet. The sections themselves are set with the sheet rather than written here, and the preview shows them as they will print. Eight weeks out (four items); Four weeks out (five items); One week out (five items); Moving day (four items); The first week (four items). Across two sheets the press rules 42 lines, twenty-two of them carrying a printed item and the rest left blank for your own.

Each section ends in blank ruled lines. No two moves hold the same things, and a section closed off tight at its last printed item is a section that cannot take the meter reading nobody remembered, the key that has to go back to a neighbour, or the parcel firm that will only deliver on a weekday. The blank lines are ordinary ruled lines, unlabelled, and they take whatever is written on them.

Sections that outgrow the sheet

Boxes accumulate, and sooner or later a section is longer than the space left below it. The sheet does not shunt that whole section onto the next page. It fills the sheet in hand to the foot, breaks between two items rather than through one, and starts the next sheet with the same heading marked (continued).

That mark is not decoration. A heading that simply appears twice, once at the bottom of one sheet and once at the top of the next, looks like a printer that has repeated itself, and the natural response is to go hunting for a page that was never missing. The word settles it in one glance. Pushing the section whole would have had the opposite trouble: half a sheet of white paper, and a section longer than a full sheet would have overrun anyway.

Black ink only

Everything prints black. A moving list is the sort of paper that gets run off on whatever machine is nearest, often the one at work or the one at a parent’s house, and a form whose meaning depends on colour arrives out of a mono printer with its meaning removed. Rule weight and spacing carry the structure instead, and those come through on any printer.

The file is written in the browser

No template file is stored anywhere for this sheet. The geometry is written for this site and runs in the browser: the controls set the layout, the drawing redraws, and the PDF is composed byte by byte on the reader’s own machine before the download begins. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is fetched, and no part of the artwork is licensed from anyone else.

The practical effect is that the sheet can be redrawn at a different setting and printed again at no cost and with no second file to keep track of. A move usually needs more than one copy anyway, one for the wall of the old place and one for the box that travels with the kettle.