Free Printable Paper Templates

How the paper templates work

Each template is a blank A4 page, printed in black on white, with lines, dots or squares to guide the hand. The spacing is the main thing to choose: tight lines for small handwriting and notes, wide lines or large squares for young children and big drawings.

• Thin lines: every line is 0.25 mm thick, clear on the page without crowding the writing; only the axes of the coordinate grids are drawn thicker.
• One step for all: the spacings are measured in steps of 5.76 mm, from a line on every step on the tightest lined paper to a line every four steps on the widest.
• Safe margins: 14.4 mm stay blank at the top and bottom of the page, so that no printer cuts off a line and a name fits above the first one.

Every paper on these pages is free to print, and a template never changes: the same model always gives the same sheet.

Types of printable paper

• Lined paper: full lines across the page, for writing, notes and lists.
• Dotted paper: the same lines drawn as rows of small round dots, about 3 mm apart, lighter on the page than full lines.
• Dashed paper: the same lines once more, made of short 2 mm dashes, one on each dot of the dotted paper.
• Grid paper, also called graph paper: squares over the whole page, for math, charts, tables and pixel drawings.
• Isometric dot paper: dots placed on a pattern of equilateral triangles, each second row offset by half the spacing, for drawing cubes and solids in perspective.
• Handwriting paper: rows of three lines for learning to form letters, a dashed line running between two solid ones, with room below each row for the tails of g, j and y.
• Music staff paper: nine staves of five lines each, for writing music by hand.
• Coordinate grids: twenty squares along each side, crossed by two bold axes with arrowheads and a number on every second line, for plotting points and drawing graphs.

Paper spacings and sizes

• Lined, dotted and dashed paper: the same eight models for all three. Model 1 has a line every 5.76 mm, 46 lines on the page; Model 2 every 11.5 mm, 23 lines; Model 3 every 17.3 mm, 16 lines; Model 4 every 23 mm, 12 lines. Models 5 and 6 set the lines in pairs, Models 7 and 8 in groups of three, 5.76 mm apart inside a group, with 11.5 mm between groups in Models 5 and 7 and 17.3 mm in Models 6 and 8.
• Grid paper: small squares of 5.76 mm or large squares of 11.5 mm.
• Isometric dot paper: small triangles with 5.76 mm sides or large ones with 11.5 mm sides.
• Handwriting paper: letters 23 mm tall from the top line to the baseline, the size of the first years of school, then 17.3 mm, then 11.5 mm, the space for tails being half that height.
• Music staff paper: five lines 2.88 mm apart, so each staff is 11.5 mm tall, with 17.3 mm between staves.
• Coordinate grids: either the four quadrants, each axis running from −10 to 10 through the center of the grid, or only the first quadrant, each axis running from 0 to 20 out of the lower left corner. One grid fills the page with 8.64 mm squares, or two or four smaller grids share it.

Tic tac toe boards

• Boards: 3x3 for the classic game, 4x4 and 5x5 for four or five in a row, from four to twenty boards on a sheet.
• Styles: a # of thick lines with rounded ends, the way a board is drawn by hand, or a framed style, thin lines closed by a heavy border.
• Winner boxes: on some sheets, a little cross and a little circle sit beneath every board, with a box beside each where players tick who won.

Paper terms explained

• Baseline: the line that letters sit on.
• Midline: the dashed line halfway up a row of handwriting paper, which small letters like m, o and x reach.
• Descender: the part of a letter that drops below the baseline, as in g, p and y.
• Staff, or stave: the five lines on which musical notes are written.
• Isometric drawing: a way of drawing solids in which the three edges of a cube that meet at a corner have the same length and lie 120 degrees apart.
• Quadrant: one of the four parts into which the two axes divide a coordinate grid; the first quadrant is the top right one, where both coordinates are positive.
• Origin: the point where the two axes cross, with the coordinates (0, 0).

Printing the free paper templates

• Each type of paper has its own page, with one sheet per model, and for the coordinate grids, one sheet per model and number of grids.
• Sheets download as PDF, SVG or WebP files for A4 paper; the sizes given above are those of an A4 sheet printed at full size.
• A type with more than one model also comes with a book: all its sheets in a single PDF.
• The Paper Generator and the Coordinate Grid Generator draw the same templates, and can add a line for a name and a date at the top of the page.
• The Tic Tac Toe generator draws the boards, and also makes them with other counts, styles and sizes.