Weekly planner

What is on the paper

The sheet is A4 landscape, 841.89 by 595.28 points, and it is titled Weekly planner, Monday to Sunday. Seven columns run across it, one for each day of the week. Saturday and Sunday hold columns of their own rather than sharing one between them, so the week does not narrow towards its end. There are no dates anywhere on it, so it is not tied to a particular week and the same sheet prints again the week after.

As it is set, the drawing comes to seventy-one ruled lines, one box and ten words of print on the whole page. The finished file is 5,327 bytes. There is no border, no motif, no shaded header band and nothing that has to be trimmed off. 39 millimetres of column and 16 millimetres between rules, with eight of them in each day

What the controls change

The number of days is a setting, so the same drawing gives a shorter working week or the full seven. The paper is a setting, and the same layout is drawn at A5. The number of weeks is a setting, and that is what turns one sheet into a run of sheets.

Every change is a redraw rather than an edit. The geometry is worked out again from the new measurements and a new file is written, so the sheet on screen and the sheet that comes out of the printer are the same object and not a picture of one.

Two weeks, numbered

A fortnight planner is this sheet printed twice. Asked for a run of two, each copy is numbered on the paper: Week 1 of 2, then Week 2 of 2. That number is doing real work. A fortnight is the same seven day names over again, so without a number the two sheets are identical, and once they are off the printer and lying on a table there is nothing on either one to say which Monday is which.

Day names in full

The names print in full here: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and on to Sunday. Where a column is too narrow to carry a whole name, the name is shortened and the lettering is left at the size it was. Reducing the type would reduce it across the sheet, in the parts that are read closely as well as the heading, to save a few letters in a label the reader already finds by position.

Black only

Everything is drawn in black. A form whose meaning is carried by colour comes out of a mono printer with its meaning removed: the colours arrive as shades of grey and the reader is left guessing what they used to say. Nothing on this sheet is keyed by colour, so a black and white printer loses none of it, and no colour ink is spent on a page that is going to be written on in biro.

PDF, Word and Excel

The PDF is written in the browser. The settings go into a geometry engine on this page that writes the file byte by byte; nothing is uploaded, nothing is licensed from anyone and there is no stock template sitting on a server waiting to be sent. The same week is offered as a Word document and as an Excel workbook, for readers who would rather type into the grid, keep it on a shared drive, or change the headings themselves.