Planner labels

The sheet is titled Planner labels, 38 by 12 mm, 72 to a sheet. It is one sheet of A4 in portrait, tiled with label shapes at a real millimetre size so that what comes off the printer measures what the title says it measures. Like everything on the site it is drawn by the page: a geometry engine sets out the tiling and writes the PDF byte by byte in the browser.

What these are, and what they are not

These are functional shapes. They are rectangles, notches and rules, drawn as plain geometry in black. Nothing on this site is drawn as artwork, so there are no patterns, no illustrations, no seasonal motifs and no decorated die cuts anywhere on the sheet. A reader who came looking for printed stickers with pictures on them should know that before the paper goes in, because this sheet will not turn into that.

What they are is a page of blanks, cut to a size that fits a planner, ready to be written on.

The four styles

• Flag. A rectangle with a notch cut into one end, so the cut end reads as a pennant rather than a block.
• Banner. A rectangle with a shaded title bar across it, giving a head and a body within the one shape.
• Tab. A rectangle with a smaller tab standing off its left edge, of the kind that projects past the edge of a page once it is stuck down.
• Box. A plain rectangle with writing rules inside it, and nothing else.

The default drawing is the flag style. The other three tile at the same size on the same page.

Why 72 and not some other number

The sheet holds 72 labels, tiled four across and eighteen down. That figure is not the area of the page divided by the area of one label. The drawing leaves a gap between one label and its neighbour so that a blade or a pair of scissors has somewhere to go, and it counts those gaps in before it arrives at how many rows and columns will fit. A tiling that ignores the gaps claims more labels than the paper can actually give, and the reader discovers the difference at the cutting stage.

3 millimetres between labels and 12 at the edge of the sheet

The file

The finished PDF is 25,343 bytes. It is larger than the weekly sheets in the range for the plain reason that there is far more line work on it: the drawing reports 432 rules on the one page, against 54 on the seven day planner. There is still no image data in it, only geometry and lettering.

Black only

The labels print in black on whatever paper goes through the machine. A shape whose meaning depends on colour is a shape that loses its meaning on a mono printer, and label sheets get printed on mono printers constantly. Black outlines take colour readily afterwards, from a pen, a highlighter, or coloured paper stock chosen before printing rather than after.

Made in the browser

Nothing here is hosted or licensed. The sheet is drawn on the reader’s own machine and written to a file there, and the preview and the download come from the same drawing pass rather than from two files that could disagree. There are 25 sheets on the site, drawn the same way, running to 1,119 rules and 234 boxes in total.