Wedding planner sheet

Daybook draws a sectioned checklist for a wedding. The sheet’s own heading reads Checklist, 3 lines across 1 sheet, which is a fair description of the object: one sheet of A4, 595.28 points across and 841.89 points down, carrying headings, tick boxes and ruled lines. At the setting the page opens on, the drawing puts down six rules, three boxes, three squares and three words, and the file that comes out of it is 1,412 bytes.

A set of lists that happen to share a date

A wedding is not one list. It is several, kept by different people and answered at different times, and the sheet is laid out to match: a heading, the tick boxes that belong under it, then the next heading. The sections belong to the sheet rather than to this page, and the preview redraws as the controls are moved, so what is on screen is what will print. Twelve months or more (six items); Six to nine months (six items); Three months (six items); One month (five items); The week before (five items). Across two sheets the press rules 43 lines, twenty-eight of them carrying a printed item and the rest left blank for your own.

Every section closes with blank ruled lines. A wedding carries arrangements no printed list would think to name, a room borrowed from a relative, a supplier who answers only on Thursdays, a car to be collected the morning after, and the blank lines at the foot of a section are where those are written in by hand.

When a section runs past the foot of the sheet

Sections grow, and once one is long enough that it no longer ends above the bottom margin the sheet has to do something about it. There are two ways of doing it. The section could be moved whole to the sheet that follows, which leaves the bottom half of the first sheet blank and, if the section is longer than a sheet in the first place, still does not fit. Or the section can carry on from where it was cut.

Daybook carries it on. The section runs to the foot of the sheet, breaks between one item and the next rather than through one, and picks up at the head of the next sheet, where the heading is repeated with (continued) after it. The mark is the part that matters. A heading repeated with nothing to explain the repetition reads like a printing fault, and anyone checking the sheets would stop and go looking for the page that had supposedly gone astray.

Black, and nothing else

The sheet prints in black only. Colour on a form is a promise that one thing can be told from another by looking, and a form built on that promise comes out of an office mono printer with its meaning removed: the shaded rows all the same grey, the coloured heading no different from the rest. Weight of rule, space between lines and the position of a heading all survive that printer intact, so the sheet is built out of those instead.

Where the file comes from

Nothing here is hosted. There is no template sitting on a server waiting to be handed over, and no artwork licensed from anybody. The controls set the sheet, the drawing runs, and the PDF is assembled byte by byte in the browser by geometry written for this site. The download that follows is a file made a moment earlier, on the reader’s own machine, to the settings shown on the screen. All twenty-five sheets on the site are made that way.