A4 weekly planner

A4 is genuinely unserved by the free market

This is not a marketing line, it is a measurement. Every free weekly planner PDF we byte-inspected during research has a page box of 612 x 792 points: US Letter. Vertex42, Calendarpedia, World of Printables, Printabulls, FirstPrintable, PrintablesForLife, CalendarKart, GeneralBlue and blank-calendar are all Letter-only. Calendarpedia does not print the words A4 or US Letter anywhere on its weekly planner page and pushes A4 users to separate country domains.

The one that comes closest is CalendarKart, which advertises A4 and ships a single Letter master per design, so A4 users have to scale and thereby break its own instruction to print at 100% with no page scaling.

The UK, Ireland, most of Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all print on A4. That is a large part of the English-speaking world being told to rescale and lose their margins.

What scaling actually costs you

Letter is 215.9 mm wide and A4 is 210 mm, so a Letter file fitted to A4 scales to about 94% on width. That sounds harmless. It is not, because Letter is 279.4 mm tall against A4's 297 mm, so the fit is driven by width and the page ends up with 17.6 mm of unused paper at the bottom and a 6% reduction everywhere.

A 7.5 mm writing line becomes 7.05 mm, which is still legible. A 12.7 mm margin becomes 11.9 mm, which is close enough. The real damage is that your printer then adds its own centring, so the top and bottom margins stop matching and anything you punch or bind sits at the wrong depth. A file laid out for A4 avoids all of it.

A4 is the sheet A5 comes from

If you want A5 inserts, print the A5 2-up file on A4 and cut down the middle. Two A5 pages side by side occupy 839.06 points on an 841.89 point sheet, so the total slack is exactly 1.00 mm and each page is centred in its half.

The A-series is built on a constant ratio, so A4 halves to A5, A5 halves to A6, and each step scales by 1 over the square root of 2, which is 70.7%. That is why the reduce setting on a photocopier offers 71%.

Also known as

This layout is searched for under several names, and they all describe the same file: a4 weekly planner printable, a4 weekly planner template, a4 weekly schedule printable. One page, one grid.

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