Download a vector PDF of your graph paper directly from this page. Choose A4 or US Letter, adjust the spacing or use an inch preset, then select Download PDF. The live preview and PDF use the same drawing. For a physical printout, choose Actual size / 100% and the matching paper size; printer scaling can change the result.
Drawn in millimetres, in your browser. Nothing is generated on a server and nothing is uploaded. The margin insets the grid, but your printer still needs an actual-size test to check its non-printable edges.
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What this page actually produces
A sheet of paper with a regular grid on it, drawn to a size you choose. Three details are worth knowing before you print a batch.
The unit is the millimetre, not the pixel. The drawing’s coordinate system is the sheet itself: a line labelled 5 mm apart really is 5 mm apart in the file. Nothing is sized by screen pixels, so the result does not depend on the device it was generated on, and the file can be rescaled without the grid turning into a guess.
The marks stop before the edge. Consumer printers have a non-printable border, usually 4 to 6 mm on a laser and more on some inkjets. A grid that runs to the very edge looks fine on screen and comes back from the printer with a white strip across the top — or, worse, scaled down slightly to fit. The margin setting insets the grid line centres from the paper edges; it does not know the hardware printable area. Axis labels can extend closer to an edge. Set it to what your own printer needs; if you do not know, print one test sheet at 6 mm and measure the unprinted border.
The axes are geometry, not decoration. With the axis cross switched on, two heavier lines divide the sheet and labels count small squares outwards from the origin. That is the difference between graph paper and graph paper you can plot on: with the cross drawn you can put the origin where you want it and read a coordinate off the paper without a ruler, which is what the request behind this page usually means.
Choosing a spacing that matches the work
| Setting | Reads as | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| 2 mm | fine engineering grid | detailed scale drawings, dense data plots |
| 4 mm | light all-purpose grid | geometry exercises, small hands writing large |
| 5 mm | the classic squared paper | maths homework, plotting, floor plans |
| 7 mm | generous squares | primary-school arithmetic, pen-and-ink sketching |
| 10 mm | coarse grid | large-format diagrams, posters, group work |
Two practical notes. A grid under 3 mm at a light grey tends to disappear under photocopying or a low-toner cartridge, so pick the dark grey or teal and check one copy before running a class set. And a grid above 8 mm stops being graph paper and becomes a layout guide; if that is what you want, ruled paper or dot grid paper usually serves the purpose with less ink.
Verifying the sheet is the size you asked for
The check takes ten seconds and it is the only way to be sure, because the browser sits between the drawing and the paper.
- Print one sheet, not a batch, using scale 100 % (some dialogs call it Actual size) and the same paper size as the selector above.
- Lay a ruler along the grid and count squares. On a 5 mm setting, ten squares should measure exactly 50 mm, measured between the line centres rather than from the outer edge of a thick line.
- If the result is short by a few percent, look in the print dialog for Fit, Shrink to printable area or Scale to fit and turn it off. That setting, not this page, is the usual cause.
- If the sheet is right but the border is uneven, increase the margin setting by the shortfall and print again.
Nothing in the file changes to fix a scaling problem, which is the point: the file was already correct, and a setting in the print pipeline was correcting it back.
Axis labels, and what they are not
The numbers on the axes count small squares, so they describe the paper rather than any particular measurement. On a 5 mm grid, the label reading 5 sits 25 mm from the origin. If your plotting problem works in units of one square, the labels are ready to use as they are. If it works in millimetres, treat each label as n × spacing and write your own scale.
There is deliberately no option to relabel the axes with arbitrary units. A generator that lets you print a grid labelled in unfamiliar numbers invites arithmetic errors on the paper, and the labels are easy to overwrite by hand if a specific unit is needed.
The vector export keeps the same coordinate system as the preview. One user unit in the saved file is one millimetre of paper, so an application that can be told to open at 210 by 297 millimetres will place the drawing at exactly the right scale without any further arithmetic. Where the drawing is imported into a document at a size the application chooses for itself, set the width and height explicitly rather than dragging a corner, because a stretched vector cannot be told afterwards how much it was stretched.
Printing is the other route to a file, and it is worth saying what it produces. The browser’s print destination list includes a PDF option on every current desktop browser, and that path uses the same rendering engine as paper, so the geometry survives. The one setting that matters is the scale: a print dialog left on a fit-to-page option will shrink the sheet by two to six percent, which is invisible on a page of squares and visible immediately against a ruler.
Related pages
- Printable graph paper, A4 sized — the same grid with the geometry already settled for A4.
- Dot grid paper — a lighter field of marks for notes and design work.
- Ruled paper — line spacing instead of a grid, for writing.
- Custom paper templates — the hub for graph, dot, ruled and checklist stock in one page.
- Printer margin guide — how much of the edge a given printer refuses to print on, and how to measure it.
- Print at the right size — scaling and PDF.
Metric and inch examples you can check
These are reproducible settings, not claims about a tested physical printer. A quarter inch is 6.35 mm, so ten squares span 63.5 mm. An eighth inch is 3.175 mm, so eight squares span 25.4 mm. A 5 mm grid needs ten squares to span 50 mm. Measure between line centres after printing; the outer edges of thick lines include extra ink.
Use the same URL for metric and inch grids: the shared link records the millimetre value rather than creating a new page for each fraction. On A4, the PDF page is 210 by 297 mm; Letter is 215.9 by 279.4 mm. Changing paper size changes the available area, not the grid spacing. Download PDF respects the sheet count, while Download SVG exports one drawing. Choose the colour and axes before exporting, because the file records the preview at download time.
If a measured span is wrong, compare the file’s page size with the loaded paper before regenerating it. Adobe documents Actual size as printing without scaling. A selected margin cannot detect your printer’s hardware limits. Start with one sheet and use the printer margin guide to investigate clipping rather than assuming every printer accepts the same border.