Travel planner sheet

The travel sheet is a sectioned checklist on the same A4 page as the rest of the stock, 595.28 points by 841.89 points. Its heading reads Checklist, 4 lines across 1 sheet, and at the opening setting the drawing places seven rules, four boxes, four squares and three words. The file written for it is 1,512 bytes.

Sections rather than one column

A trip has parts that are answered at quite different moments. Some belong to the weeks before, some to the night before, some to the hour at the door. Running all of that as a single column of boxes flattens the difference, so the sheet is sectioned: a heading, the boxes under it, then the next heading. What those headings say is set with the sheet, not on this page, and the preview redraws with the controls so the arrangement is visible before anything is printed. Before booking (four items); Once it is booked (four items); Two weeks before (four items); The last week (four items). Across one sheets the press rules 32 lines, sixteen of them carrying a printed item and the rest left blank for your own.

Sections end in blank ruled lines. Trips are unalike in exactly the places a printed list cannot anticipate: a visa appointment, a hire car with a named driver, a cat that has to go somewhere, medication that needs a letter. The blank lines are plain unlabelled rules and they take all of that.

Continuation onto the next sheet

Packing sections in particular grow long, and a section will often outlast the space beneath it. The drawing keeps the section where it started, fills the sheet to the foot, breaks between two items rather than through the middle of one, and continues at the head of the next sheet with the heading repeated and marked (continued).

The alternative, pushing the entire section to the next sheet, would leave a wide band of unused paper on the first and would still fail for any section longer than a full sheet. The mark on the repeated heading is there because a heading that appears twice unexplained looks like a fault in the printing, and a reader glancing between two sheets should not have to work out whether something has gone missing.

Printed in black

The sheet prints in black only. Travel paper tends to be run off in a hurry, on a hotel machine or an office one, and a form that separates its groups by colour arrives from a mono printer with those groups merged into the same grey. Structure here is carried by rule weight, by the space around a heading and by the indent of the boxes, all of which reproduce on any printer, and all of which photocopy.

Made in the browser, not stored anywhere

There is no template file on a server for this sheet and no licensed artwork in it. The geometry was written for this site and runs where the reader is: the controls set the sheet, the drawing redraws immediately, and the PDF is assembled byte by byte in the browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is fetched.

Because the file costs nothing to make, a fresh one can be drawn for each trip, or the same setting printed twice so that one copy travels in a bag and one stays on the kitchen table. Twenty-five sheets on this site are produced the same way.