Photo2PatternFree graph paper generator
Graph paper generator — 5 mm that measures 5 mm
Pick square, isometric, dot or lined, set a spacing between 1 and 50 mm or one of the inch fractions the pads are sold in, choose the paper, and the sheet is drawn in real millimeters and printed. Nothing to pay and no account to make, and the ruling is made of strokes rather than a page background, so it reaches the printer whether or not the dialog’s background-graphics box is ticked. Every sheet carries a bar that is exactly 100 mm: put a ruler on it, and if the print came back at 96, type 96 and the next sheet is drawn 4.2% larger so the printer’s own shrink lands it on target.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 4 rulings
- 6 paper sizes
- 100 mm check bar
Vertical and horizontal rules at the spacing you set, with every nth one drawn heavier so the sheet can be counted in blocks instead of one line at a time.
One side of a square, taken between line centers rather than between the inside faces of the ink.
Typing here moves the list above to a spacing of your own. Inches are converted once at 25.4 and everything downstream works in millimeters.
Heavier rules come out at 0.30 mm. One printer dot at 300 dpi is 0.085 mm, so 0.10 mm is a single dot wide and the first weight a tired laser drops.
Set the matching one in the dialog. The dialog decides how the paper feeds; this only decides what gets drawn on it.
The dialog’s own margin must be no larger than this, or the sheet is pushed off the page before the printer ever sees it.
Drawn as strokes rather than as a page background, so it reaches the printer whether or not the background-graphics box is ticked.
Counted from the first rule, so a heavy line lands every 25.0 mm. Five is the metric habit; four matches quarter-inch quadrille.
35 across, 50 down · 5 mm
Drawn at true size
- Ruled area
- 175.0 × 250.0 mm
- 6.89 × 9.84 in, sitting inside a 180.0 × 267.0 mm drawable box.
- Squares on the sheet
- 1,750
- Whole divisions only. The 0.4 mm that will not take another one is split top and bottom instead of becoming a short line at the foot of the sheet.
- Ink on the sheet
- 6.9%
- Stroke area over sheet area, crossings counted twice, so the truth is a shade under it. Past 25% a sheet reads as a tint.
The preview is fitted to the box it sits in, so it is a picture of the sheet rather than a copy of it. A screen has no fixed relationship to a millimeter — the same CSS length is one physical size on a phone, another on a laptop and a third on a 4K panel running at 150% — so there is nothing here worth holding a ruler against. The printed sheet is, and the bar across its top is how you find out.
Leave it empty until one sheet has been printed and a ruler laid on the bar. It should read 100 mm.
Two sheets come out, not one
Printing from here puts this page’s heading on sheet 1 and the ruling, on its own and at full size, on sheet 2. Set the dialog’s page range to 2. The downloaded file has no heading on it at all, which is the better route if you are running off a stack.
The file is written at true size — 180.0 × 267.0 mm, one drawing unit to the millimeter — whatever correction is set above, because a correction belongs to one printer on one afternoon and a file outlives both.
Getting the dialog out of the way
- Scale 100%. In Chrome and Edge that is the Default entry in the scale list, not Fit to printable area. In Firefox it is the Scale field with Fit to page width cleared. In Safari it is the percentage beside Scale.
- Margins no wider than the 15.0 mm border set above. Minimum or None is always safe; anything wider pushes the ruling onto an extra page.
- Clear any Fit to page or Reduce to fit option in the printer driver as well. Two independent shrinks compound, and correcting for one makes the other harder to see.
- Then measure the bar. If it reads 100 mm, every division on that sheet is the size it claims to be. The grid drawing tool takes over from there when what you want is a photograph squared up beside a blank sheet of this.
How to print paper that measures what it says
A ruler laid across the printed bar is the only proof the first two settings survived the printer.
Choose the ruling and the spacing it is specified in
Square, isometric, dot and lined are four different lattices rather than four skins on one, and the spacing means something different in each: the side of a square, the side of an equilateral triangle, the gap between dot centers, the gap between rules. The list offers the rulings that are sold rather than a slider of round numbers — 5 mm for a European squared book, 1/4 in for US quadrille, 1/5 in for engineering pads, 9/32 in and 11/32 in for college and wide rule. Inch fractions are converted once at 25.4 and everything downstream works in millimeters, so nothing is rounded twice.
Set the paper and a blank border wider than the print dialog will ask for
The sheet is drawn inside paper minus twice the border, and that rectangle has to fit inside whatever the print dialog leaves after its own margin. The 15 mm default clears every browser default with a little to spare; 6.4 mm is for a dialog set to minimum margins, and going below that meets the printer's own unprintable strip, which on many inkjets is wider at the trailing edge than at the sides. The panel reports the exact ruled area in millimeters and inches, the number of whole divisions, and the ink the sheet will lay down as a share of its area.
Print one sheet, put a ruler on the bar, and correct if it lies
The bar across the top of the sheet is exactly 100 mm, or exactly 4 in when the spacing is an inch fraction, and it halves on a sheet too narrow to hold it — whichever length it is, the caption underneath states it. Measure it. If it reads 100 you are finished and the whole sheet is true. If it reads 96, the print was scaled to 96% somewhere between this page and the paper — type 96 into the field and the sheet is redrawn 4.2% larger, which the same shrink then cancels. Fixing the dialog is better than correcting for it, because the correction belongs to one printer while the setting belongs to every job.
Technical specifications
| Rulings offered | 4, each a different lattice: square, isometric at 30 degrees, dot at every intersection, and horizontal rules with an optional vertical margin 31.75 mm from the paper's left edge |
|---|---|
| Spacing range | 1 to 50 mm typed directly, or up to 2 in, plus 10 preset rulings that are actually sold — 5 and 10 mm, 1 mm, 1/4, 1/5, 1/8 and 1/10 in, 9/32 in college rule, 11/32 in wide rule and the 8 mm Seyès |
| Sheet sizes | 6 in both orientations: A4 210 × 297, A3 297 × 420, A5 148 × 210 mm, and US Letter 215.9 × 279.4, Legal 215.9 × 355.6 and Tabloid 279.4 × 431.8 mm converted exactly from their inch definitions |
| Divisions on the default sheet | A4, 15 mm border, 5 mm squares, 0.15 mm rules with every fifth heavier: 175 × 250 mm ruled, 35 across by 50 down, 1,750 squares, 6.9% of the drawable box under ink |
| Line weights | 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 and 0.30 mm, with heavy rules at twice the chosen weight capped at 0.45 mm. One dot at 300 dpi is 0.085 mm, so 0.10 mm is a single-dot rule |
| Scale check | A 100 mm bar ticked every 10 mm, or a 4 in bar ticked every inch when the spacing is an inch fraction, halving to 50 mm or 2 in on a sheet too narrow to carry it. Measuring it and typing the result redraws the sheet by the reciprocal, accepted between 80% and 120% |
| File out | SVG at true size, with width and height declared in millimeters and one drawing unit to the millimeter. No PNG, because a browser-written PNG carries no resolution tag |
| What the page transmits | Nothing. Six numbers and four dropdown choices become an SVG in the tab, and the print goes from the tab to your printer without a round trip |
Frequently asked questions
Why did my 5 mm squares come out at 4.7 mm?
Because something between the page and the paper scaled it, and the usual culprit is the print dialog's own fit-to-page setting rather than anything on this site. Chrome and Edge offer a scale list where Fit to printable area silently shrinks the page by a few percent so it clears the printer's unprintable border; Firefox has a Fit to page width checkbox that does the same thing; a printer driver can then apply a second reduction of its own on top. All three are invisible in the preview, because the preview is scaled with everything else. That is the entire reason the check bar exists: it is a length you can disprove with a ruler, and 4.7 against 5.0 is a 94% print, which is very close to the standard fit-to-printable reduction on Letter paper.
Should I ask for 1/4 inch or 5 mm squares?
Ask for whichever unit the work is measured in, because a converted grid gives you fractional readings forever. US quadrille is 4 squares to the inch at 6.35 mm, engineering pads are 5 to the inch at 5.08 mm, and both let you read a dimension in inches straight off the sheet. The European 5 mm squared exercise book puts 2 squares to the centimeter and 10 to a heavy line if you ask for a heavier rule every 10. Millimeter paper is the odd one: 1 mm squares with heavier rules every 5 and every 10, which this tool draws as a single heavy interval rather than two, since a browser cannot reliably print three distinguishable weights at 1 mm.
Is the isometric setting drawing isometric paper or triangle paper?
Isometric, in the drafting orientation: one vertical family plus two families at 30 degrees above the horizontal, so all three axes of an isometric drawing fall along printed lines. Triangle paper is the same lattice turned a quarter turn — horizontal rules plus two families at 60 degrees — and if that is what you want, print this and rotate the sheet. Plenty of generators label the horizontal-rule version isometric, which is not wrong so much as unusable for the thing isometric paper is for, since none of your three drawing directions would follow a line.
Why is there no PNG download?
Because a PNG written by a browser carries no resolution tag, so nothing downstream knows how big it is meant to be. A canvas exported at 300 dots to the inch has the right number of pixels and no pHYs chunk to say so, which means a word processor or a layout program places it at the default 96 dots to the inch and prints it 3.1 times too large — the precise failure this page exists to prevent. The SVG has its physical size in the file, in millimeters, in the width and height attributes, and any program that opens it will place it at the size it claims.
How thin can the lines be before the printer stops drawing them?
0.10 mm is the practical floor and it is about the width of a single dot at 300 dpi, which is 0.085 mm. A 600 dpi laser resolves 0.042 mm and holds a 0.10 mm rule cleanly; an inkjet in draft mode will break it into a dotted line, and a fax-grade photocopier will lose it entirely. The four weights offered are 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 and 0.30 mm, and heavier rules are drawn at twice the chosen weight up to a 0.45 mm cap, because a heavy rule that gets much thicker than that starts to eat the square it is supposed to bound.
The panel says my sheet is 34% ink. What does that mean?
It is the stroke area divided by the area of the drawable box, and past about a quarter the paper reads as a gray tint with a grid faintly on top rather than as a grid. The arithmetic is unavoidable: rules of a fixed width laid at a shrinking spacing cover a rising share of the page. On A4 with a 15 mm border, 5 mm squares at the 0.15 mm weight come to 6.9%; the same sheet at 1 mm comes to 34% and trips the warning. Dropping that 1 mm sheet to the 0.10 mm weight takes it to 22% and clears it, which is why the advice is to change the weight before you change the spacing. The figure counts every crossing twice, so the truth is always a shade below what is shown.
Can I get an exact number of squares rather than a full sheet?
Indirectly, and the blank border is the control that does it. The tool fills the drawable box with whole divisions and reports how many it fitted, so widening the border removes squares from the outside in — 35 across on A4 at 5 mm with a 15 mm border becomes 33 at 20 mm. Nothing is ever drawn as a part square: the millimeters that will not take another whole one are split between the two edges rather than left as a sliver at the bottom, which is why the ruled area comes out a millimeter or two under the box that holds it.
About printed spacing, and the two places it goes wrong
Ruled paper is specified in whatever unit its market counts in, and the numbers have been stable for a century. US quadrille is 4 squares to the inch, engineering pads are 5, and the finer drawing grades run to 8 and 10; college rule is 9/32 in between lines and wide rule 11/32 in, both with a vertical margin 1-1/4 in from the left edge. The metric side settles on 5 mm for the squared exercise book, 10 mm where centimeter squares are wanted, and 1 mm for the millimeter paper that engineering and school laboratories plot on. The French Seyès ruling is the outlier that proves the point: 8 mm between the strong horizontals, subdivided by finer lines, with verticals at the same 8 mm — a ruling designed for teaching handwriting rather than for plotting, and unmistakable as soon as you see it. None of these are round in the other system, which is why converting a grid is a bad idea. A sheet at 6.35 mm reads as an awkward decimal forever; a sheet at 1/4 in reads as a quarter inch.
The second thing that goes wrong is the printer, and it is the reason this page exists rather than a static PDF. CSS defines an inch as 96 units, browsers honor millimeters when they lay out for paper, and up to that point the arithmetic is exact. Then the print dialog applies a scale. Chrome and Edge carry an entry in their scale list that fits the page inside the printer’s reported printable area, Firefox carries the same idea as a fit-to-page-width checkbox, either can be the state you inherit without choosing it, and the printer driver can then add a reduction of its own that no browser knows about. Each of these is a small multiplication — three to six percent is typical, because a household printer cannot lay ink within roughly 3 to 5 mm of three edges and further from the fourth — and every one of them is invisible in the preview, since the preview is scaled along with the page. A ruler on a printed bar is the only instrument that sees them. That is also why the download is an SVG and not a PNG: an SVG states its width in millimeters inside the file, while a PNG written by a browser carries no resolution tag at all and is placed at 96 dots to the inch by whatever opens it.
What people do with these sheets, on this site at least, is count things onto them, and that changes which spacing is right. A midi fuse bead is 5 mm across, so a 5 mm sheet is one cell to one bead and can be laid on the table beside a Perler bead pattern while you sort colors by hand. Knitters and crocheters need the opposite of a square, because a stitch is wider than it is tall and a design charted on squares comes out squashed when it is worked — the same correction the knitting chart generator makes for you, and one you can make here by hand by ruling to the row height rather than the stitch width. And where the lattice is not square at all, the sibling page takes over: the hex grid generator owns the two orientations, the three ways a hexagon can be measured and the coordinate labeling, which is a large enough subject that squeezing it in here as a fifth ruling would have made both pages worse.
Product and company names shown here are the trademarks of their respective owners. Photo2Pattern is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them.
The sheet is made here, not fetched
Nothing you type here leaves the tab. The arithmetic runs in JavaScript on your own machine — there is no server to send it to, no account to sign in to and nothing stored between visits. Close the tab and nothing of it remains.
There is no library of pre-made sheets behind this page and no request goes out when you change a setting: the SVG is assembled from your six numbers in the tab, drawn into the page, and handed to the printer or written to a file by the same code. Nothing is remembered between visits, so a spacing you liked has to be set again — which is the cost of there being nowhere for it to have been kept.