Been a long time for updates, I’ve gone onto several other games projects since my last few posts, and while those are fun I’m actually here to talk about something slightly more boring but possibly useful enough to share the code/pdf!
For work I end up taking a lot of notes in notebooks, but one of my peeves about that is I often end up with so many notes that I burn through notebooks fast.
Fast enough that I’ve decided I’m going to just print and bind my own damn notebooks (Some of the ones my wife got me on some sale deal lately are smaller than normal, so I burn through one notebook in about 2-3 weeks, they came as a pack of like 10 or so little notebooks, but it’s kind of bothersome to have to swap notebooks that often because it means I might have to reference something across multiple little notebooks.
Part of having a notebook of course is having lined paper to print onto the copy paper in order to have some lines to write on, if I don’t do that my writing will warp all over the page.
You can find resources for printing lined paper all over the place, but the slight issue I have is that usually they’re meant for printing onto a solid 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper, which isn’t conducive to binding together into a notebook.
What I want is to basically print something sideways onto an 8.5x11 sheet, so that I can just fold it in half, stack a bunch together, and staple them together into a notebook segment like you might see in one of those fancy schmancy traveler’s notebooks.
So to do this, I decided I may as well use LaTeX, it’s a tool I’ve used on and off over the past 10 or so years to make various pdfs of stuff.
I found this resource for how to make lined paper using LaTeX and tikz: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes//printable-paper-with-latex-and-tikz/
It’s a good resource, and it got me 99% of the way there!
What I did was I took his college ruled letter size page: pdf download, tex source
And then copied out the college ruling, and then turned it sideways to landscape, added little date lines at the top left and right sides of the sheet of paper, and then duplicated all that to be on a second page too (because when printing multiple copies, a printer does not want to duplex print the same document onto each side of the page, for whatever reason when test printing it decided to just spawn a new page entirely for each copy of a 1-page document. Yeah I guess that makes sense when you normally print multiple copies of a document, but that means we need to have two identical pages in our pdf in order to print it properly)
So here’s the code:
\documentclass[letterpaper, 10pt,landscape]{article} %for letter size paper
%215.mm x 279.4mm
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
%page 1
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
\tikzset{normal lines/.style={gray, very thin}}
%draw date lines
\node at (current page.south west){
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
%left side date
\draw[style=normal lines] (0.15in,8.0in)--(0.55in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (0.65in,8.0in)--(1.05in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (1.15in,8.0in)--(1.55in,8.0in);
%right side date
\draw[style=normal lines] (9.45in,8.0in)--(9.85in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (9.95in,8.0in)--(10.35in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (10.45in,8.0in)--(10.85in,8.0in);
\foreach \y in {0.71,1.41,...,19.81}
\draw[style=normal lines](0,\y)--(11in, \y);
%\draw[style=normal lines] (1.25in,0)--(1.25in,11in);
\end{tikzpicture}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\pagebreak
%page 2
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
\tikzset{normal lines/.style={gray, very thin}}
%draw date lines
\node at (current page.south west){
\begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
%left side date
\draw[style=normal lines] (0.15in,8.0in)--(0.55in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (0.65in,8.0in)--(1.05in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (1.15in,8.0in)--(1.55in,8.0in);
%right side date
\draw[style=normal lines] (9.45in,8.0in)--(9.85in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (9.95in,8.0in)--(10.35in,8.0in);
\draw[style=normal lines] (10.45in,8.0in)--(10.85in,8.0in);
\foreach \y in {0.71,1.41,...,19.81}
\draw[style=normal lines](0,\y)--(11in, \y);
%\draw[style=normal lines] (1.25in,0)--(1.25in,11in);
\end{tikzpicture}
};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
Run that bit through pdflatex and you get two pages that look like this (can’t upload the pdf because of reasons…)
Print them duplex, flipping on the short side (since this is landscape) and then presto, you got a double sided sheet with lines that you can print a bunch of and then fold and staple to make your own notebooks.
I haven’t run all the numbers here on cost savings but I think it’s safe to say that when you get 1500 sheets of copy paper off amazon for $23 it’s going to be cheaper to make 1500x4 pages of notebook paper (remember we’re talking the 8.5x6.5 sheet from folding the 8.5x11 in half, roughly equivalent perhaps to an A5?) than it is to buy that many pre-made refills of a notebook.
In fact some of the inserts I’ve finding for traveler’s are even narrower than these, running 8.25x4.25, so this may even be bigger sheets of paper!
