Engineering graph paper, 1/10 inch

Tenth-inch squares with a heavier line every five — the ruling on engineering pads, and the one that makes decimal work painless.

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Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.

Why tenths rather than eighths

Engineering and science run on decimals, so a grid divided into tenths lets you read 3.7 straight off the paper instead of converting from sevenths of an eighth. Architects and woodworkers, who work in fractions, generally want the opposite — quarter-inch paper subdivided into eighths.

The half-inch emphasis

With major lines every five squares, each heavy line is half an inch and each pair is a full inch. That gives you three levels to read at a glance: fine tenths for plotting, half-inch blocks for counting, and inches for scale. It is the same logic as the 1/5/10 mm hierarchy on metric graph paper.

Traditional engineering pads print on the back

Classic engineering paper has the grid printed faintly on the reverse of the sheet, so the front is clean and the grid shows through. You cannot reproduce that on a home printer, but you can get close by setting a very light grid colour — the lines guide you without photographing or scanning.

Printing it accurately

This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100% — not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.