French ruled paper

The ruling used in every French exercise book: 8 mm squares, each divided by three fine lines into four 2 mm bands, with a red margin rule down the left.

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

What the small lines are actually for

This is the part that gets lost when people describe Seyes as "graph paper with lines". The three fine horizontal lines inside each 8 mm square are called interlignes, and they divide the square into four bands of 2 mm. They are letter-height guides. The body of a lowercase letter sits in one 2 mm band. Ascenders and capitals rise through three of them. Descenders drop one band below the strong line. French children are taught to write against those bands from their first year, which is why a French hand has such consistent proportions and why ordinary 8 mm lined paper is not a substitute. The spacing is the same; the instrument is missing.

Everything is derived from one measurement

The ruling is a system rather than a set of independent settings, so this sheet has one real control. The square is 8 mm and everything else follows from it: the interlignes at a quarter of that, the vertical lines at the same 8 mm, the margin rule landing exactly on a vertical so it never cuts a square in half. Scale the square up in the generator and the whole system scales with it and stays in proportion, which is what you want for a young child who cannot yet write into a 2 mm band. Scale it down and you get the tighter ruling used in later school years.

The red margin, and an honest note about its position

The vertical rule down the left is where a French teacher writes corrections, and it is traditionally red. You can switch it off, or keep the line and print it in the sheet color instead, if a single red line in an otherwise gray sheet is going to eat an inkjet color cartridge. Its distance from the edge is adjustable here, in whole squares, and the reason it is adjustable rather than fixed is that the sources disagree. One figure repeated across several sites puts it at 80 mm from the edge, which cannot be right, since that is wider than the ruled area of an A4 sheet. Five squares matches the French copies we could actually measure. If your school or your habit wants a different position, move it.

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.