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ScoreSheetPress

Printable score sheets that come out right

Every pad on this site is built to print without adjustment on both common paper sizes. This page explains what that took, what your printer dialog is about to do to it, and the three settings that account for nearly every sheet that comes out wrong.

One sheet, two paper sizes

Letter is wider and shorter than A4; A4 is narrower and longer. A layout pinned to one of them either loses a column or leaves a band of waste on the other, which is why so many downloadable pads say "US Letter" in the filename and misbehave everywhere else in the world.

The fix is to specify neither. Nothing here names a paper size at all: there is a single twelve-millimetre margin, and every width is expressed as a share of whatever page turns up. The grid is the same grid on both, slightly different in proportion and correct in both cases, and no scaling prompt is needed.

The three settings that ruin a printout

Headers and footers are the first: turn them off, or the page arrives with a URL along the bottom and a date across the top, stealing the space the last row needed. Background graphics is the second — several pads here shade a heading band, and with backgrounds disabled those bands come out white, which is cosmetic rather than fatal.

The third is the scaling control. Leave it at a hundred per cent. Fit-to-page sounds helpful and quietly shrinks the writing boxes below the size a pen can use, which is the difference between a sheet somebody fills in and a sheet somebody abandons after two rounds.

Ink, rules and small sheets

Table rules are set in real black rather than a light grey, because economy mode drops pale lines entirely and a column with no lines in it is not a score column. If your printer is low on ink, the grid is the last thing that will fade — that is deliberate, and it is why these look plainer on paper than they do on screen.

Where a game's pad is small — four colour rows, or nine holes, or two teams racing to ten — two complete copies print on one page with a dashed cut line between them. A single small grid on a full page is a waste of paper and of the twenty seconds spent fetching it.

Common questions

Do I need to download a PDF?

No. Press print on the page itself and the browser produces the sheet directly; the navigation, the explanations and the advertising are all excluded by the print stylesheet. There is nothing to download and nothing to open in a separate application.

Why does my printout have a URL along the bottom?

That is your browser adding headers and footers, not the page. Every print dialog has a switch for them — often behind "More settings" — and turning it off returns the space to the sheet.

Can I print in landscape?

You can, and for a sheet with seven or eight columns it is often better: the columns get wider and the writing boxes get easier to use. Portrait is the default because most games here are played by four people or fewer.

Will the scores I have already typed be printed too?

Yes. The boxes print with whatever is in them, so a game in progress or a finished one both come out as a filled sheet. For a blank pad, print before you start typing or open the page in a fresh tab.

Every other sheet on this site