Blank visual schedule

The sheet is titled Blank visual schedule, 6 boxes. It is one sheet of A4 in portrait, drawn by the page itself. A geometry engine sets the boxes out to the paper and writes the PDF byte by byte in the browser, so there is no file on a server, nothing licensed from anybody, and no template to fall out of date.

What is drawn

Six boxes, running down the sheet in a single strip. Each box is numbered, and under each box there is a rule for a label to be written on by hand. As drawn, the sheet reports six boxes, seven rules and seven words of set type. That is the whole of it. The finished PDF is 1,911 bytes, which is what a page of this little line work costs.

91.6 millimetres across and 85.6 deep

Blank means blank

Nothing is printed inside the boxes. There are no symbols, no icons and no pictures anywhere on the sheet, for the same reason there are none anywhere else on this site: nothing here is drawn as artwork. The boxes are empty rectangles and they stay empty until somebody puts something in them, whether that is a drawing, a photograph trimmed to size, a printed picture stuck down, or writing.

The rule under each box is a writing line for a label. It sits outside the box rather than inside it, so whatever goes in the box does not have to share the space with the words underneath it.

Six boxes on one sheet

Six is the count this drawing makes. Fewer boxes on a sheet of A4 gives each one more room; more boxes gives each one less. Numbering is drawn on the sheet rather than left to be added, because a numbered strip stays in order when it is handled, and an unnumbered one has to be reconstructed every time it is picked up.

Black only

The sheet prints in black. This matters more on a sheet like this than on a ruled grid. A form whose meaning depends on colour comes out of a mono printer with its meaning removed, and if the boxes were distinguished from one another by colour alone, a mono print would leave six identical grey rectangles and no way back. Numbered boxes and a written label survive any printer they meet. Colour, if it is wanted, goes on afterwards with a pen or comes from the paper stock.

Cutting it up

The boxes are drawn with full rules around them, so the strip can be printed and used whole or cut into six separate cards along the lines that are already there. Nothing on the sheet assumes one or the other. The label rule sits under each box, which means a box cut out on its own carries its own label line with it.

Made where it is read

The preview on the page and the downloaded file come out of one drawing pass, not two, so the sheet on screen is the sheet in the PDF. It is written on the reader’s machine and nothing is sent anywhere to produce it. There are 25 sheets on the site altogether, drawn by the same engine, amounting to 1,119 rules, 234 boxes and 93 time slots across the whole range.