I’m a big fan of dot grid paper: it’s much more versatile than ruled paper and I find dots much less intrusive than full grid lines. I’ve been using retail dot grid notebooks and note pads for years, but that’s kind of an inefficient way to get scratch paper, so I decided I may as well start printing my own.

There are lots of “dot grid generators” online, but the vast majority of them embed watermarks in their output, which I find completely unacceptable. The extremely rare few that don’t watermark their output seem to consistently get the math wrong: the grid should be centered between the margins, not just pressed up against one side. It’s also useful to generate two pages of dot grid, with margined mirrored on the second side, in order to print double-sided paper with a single edge suitable for binding. (Side note: “disc binding” is much much better than ring binding, and it’s a travesty that most disc binding supplies are available only for the half-letter/”junior” paper size, which is already absurdly tall and skinny before you even lose a significant margin to the binding.)

So I wrote my own generator, which was also an opportunity to learn just enough PDF syntax to specify paper sizes and write a graphics stream.

Here’s the application.

There’s also a public repository in case you’d like to offer a PR to pretty things up a bit.