Perfboard layout paper, A4
0.1 inch pitch, 2.54 mm, on A4, printed at true size so a DIP chip laid on the paper covers exactly the holes it will cover on the board.
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0.1 inch is the pitch almost everything uses
The 2.54 mm spacing is not arbitrary: it is the pin pitch of the dual in-line package, and it propagated from there to perfboard, stripboard, breadboards, headers, and most through-hole components. It is why a 14-pin DIP straddles a breadboard channel correctly and why almost any through-hole part will drop into almost any protoboard. Planning at that pitch means your paper layout maps one-to-one onto the board.
Print at true size, then test with a real part
The whole value here is that the paper matches the board, which evaporates if the print dialog scales the page. Verify it directly rather than trusting the setting: lay an actual DIP chip or a length of pin header on the printed sheet and check the pins land on the holes. If they drift over ten pins, the page was rescaled, see the calibration page. This takes ten seconds and saves a board.
Plan before you solder, especially on stripboard
On plain perfboard the cost of a bad layout is messy point-to-point wiring. On stripboard it is worse, because the copper strips run the length of the board and every unintended connection has to be cut with a spot face cutter or drill bit. Marking the cuts on paper first, and counting them twice, is the difference between a board that works first time and an afternoon with a continuity tester.
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.