8 mm ruled paper, A4
Eight-millimetre ruling on A4 — the standard for secondary school exercise books and refill pads across Britain and much of the Commonwealth.
Opens with these settings already loaded. Change anything you like, then download as PDF, PNG or SVG.
The British exercise book ruling
Eight millimetres, described in the UK stationery trade as "8 mm feint ruled", sits between American wide rule at about 8.7 mm and college rule at 7.1 mm. In practice it behaves closer to college rule, because British handwriting instruction tends toward a smaller hand than the American wide-ruled tradition assumes. Twenty-nine or thirty lines fit on an A4 page with normal margins.
Feint means light
Feint is not a misspelling of faint, though it means much the same thing — it is the stationery trade's term for the pale blue or grey horizontal ruling on writing paper, as distinct from the darker vertical margin line. Keep the line weight low and the colour light. A ruling that competes with your handwriting defeats its own purpose, and dark rules photocopy badly.
The margin
British ruled paper conventionally carries a single red vertical margin about 30 mm from the left edge, used for question numbers and for the teacher's marks. Switch the margin rule on before downloading if you want it. For A4 filed in a two-hole European binder, 30 mm also happens to clear the punch holes, which is not a coincidence — the conventions grew up together.
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.