To-do list

The sheet on this page is titled To-do list, 24 lines. It is one A4 sheet at 595.28 by 841.89 points. Each line is ruled its full width with a tick box at the head of it, and the lines can be set in one column, two columns or three across the page. Above them there is an optional band of numbered priorities, printed as numbers with empty space after each one.

What is drawn on it

At the setting shown, the sheet counts 30 ruled lines, 28 boxes, 27 squares and 3 words of printed text, and the file comes to 3,977 bytes. twenty-four tick boxes on the list lines and three in the priority band, inside the band’s own frame

Columns

One column gives the longest writing line and the fewest entries. Three columns give the most entries and the shortest line against each. Two sits between them. The choice is a trade between how many things fit and how much of each one can be written down, and the sheet does not decide it: the count of lines and the count of columns are both set before the file is drawn.

The tick boxes

Each box is an outline drawn in black, wide enough to take a tick or a cross from an ordinary pen. Nothing about a box means anything different from any other box, and none of them is shaded, tinted or filled. That is deliberate. Every sheet on this site prints in black only, because a form whose meaning depends on colour comes out of a mono printer with its meaning removed, and a photocopied list is still a list.

The priority band

The band across the top is numbered and otherwise empty. The numbers are printed, the lines beside them are not filled in, and the ordering is the only structure the sheet imposes. It can be left off entirely, in which case the page is ruled lines and boxes from the top margin down.

Plain, not decorated

There is no illustration on this sheet. No border of drawn flowers, no cartoon at the corner, no tinted panel behind the lines. What is on the paper is rules, boxes and a very small amount of printed text, and it is the whole of the sheet. If a decorated list is what is wanted, this is not that sheet, and saying so is more use than pretending otherwise.

Where it comes from

The list is drawn by this site, in the reader’s browser, at the moment it is asked for. The PDF is written out byte by byte by a geometry engine that belongs to the site: nothing is uploaded, nothing is licensed from a stock library, and there is no template file sitting on a server waiting to be served. Changing the number of lines or the number of columns redraws the sheet from scratch rather than picking a different prepared file.

What is not on the site

There are 25 sheets here in total, and between them they draw 1,119 ruled lines, 234 boxes and 93 time slots. A dated month grid is not among them. A month grid is a calendar rather than a planner sheet, and calendars are answered elsewhere rather than duplicated here. The lists, the day sheets and the ruled forms are what this site draws.