A5 weekly planner

What almost every free A5 planner actually is

It is a US Letter file. We downloaded and byte-inspected sixteen free weekly planner PDFs from the sites that rank for these terms, and every one of them had a page box of 612 x 792 points, which is 8.5 x 11 inches. Several of the pages serving them mention A5 in the print instructions. The file underneath is Letter.

What that means in practice is that you are told to select Fit to page, which scales the artwork to about 65% and takes a 7.5mm writing line down to 4.9mm, below the 6.35mm minimum for legible handwriting. Your margins move too, so a file designed with 12.7mm of clearance ends up with 8mm, and anything punched or trimmed loses more.

This file has a page box of 419.53 x 595.28 points, which is 148 x 210 mm, which is A5. Printed at 100% it is A5.

Three ways to print it, and which to pick

If your printer has an A5 tray or you have pre-cut A5 paper, use the native file and print at 100%. It sets the print dialog to Actual size for you.

If you are printing on A4 and cutting, use the 2-up sheet. It places two A5 pages side by side on a landscape A4 with a centre cut line. Two A5 pages side by side measure 839.06 points against A4's 841.89, so the total slack is 2.83 points, which is exactly 1.00 mm. That gap exists because ISO rounds A5 to 148mm rather than the 148.5mm that halving A4 would give. Each page is centred in its half, so the error is half a millimetre per side and the pages are still exactly A5.

If you want trim marks on all four sides, use the centred sheet: one A5 page positioned in the middle of an A4 with 31.00 mm at the sides and 43.50 mm top and bottom. An exact-fit 2-up cannot carry outer trim marks, because the page edges are the sheet edges and there is nowhere to print them.

• Native A5For an A5 tray or pre-cut paper. Print at 100%.
• 2-up on A4Two pages per sheet, exactly 100%, one centre cut line. 1.00 mm total slack.
• Centred on A4One page per sheet with full four-side trim marks, for precise trimming.

Never use the printer driver's own 2-up

The Pages per sheet or Multiple option in your print dialog does not do what these files do. It takes a full-size page and scales it down to fit the slot, which for a Letter page in a half-Letter slot works out at 64.71% and leaves a 35.11 mm white band down the sheet. That is the source of the elongated halves people complain about.

These 2-up files are imposed natively: the child page genuinely is A5 at 100%, positioned on the sheet. Nothing is scaled at any point.

A5 in a ring binder

A5 organiser inserts use a six-ring pattern in two groups of three, 19.05 mm within each group and 69.85 mm between the groups, giving a total hole span of 146.05 mm on the 210 mm edge. Set the binding to six-ring A5 in the generator and the file adds a 15 mm allowance on the punched edge, mirrored across a spread so the rings never land on your writing.

A5 is also the standard bullet journal size, which is why the dot grid layout defaults to it.

Also known as

This layout is searched for under several names, and they all describe the same file: a5 weekly planner printable free pdf, a5 planner printable free, a5 weekly planner inserts, a5 weekly planner template. One page, one grid.

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