HN Explorer

38 comments

[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 87.2 ms ] thread
famousactress
Oh wow. I love this idea (edit: AND execution!).. I guess it's a minor bummer that I assume my printer won't print full-bleed but still... Things I'd love even more: Indications of exact sizing and the ability to choose what shade of gray/black to be printed.
vobios
This one has some of the options your are looking for such as spacing, color, and page border: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/
twic
Gridzzly (and why is this not gridzz.ly?) is nice and all, but the Incompetech generator is in fact much better. Still, we're startup fanboys, we're not that bothered about substance if there's some nice style on offer.
kaitai
The Incompetech has some useful ones like polar and triangular, too.
avmich
I'd like to be able to add my own pattern - because few of somewhat useful are missing and for other reasons.
x43b
This is a fun website. I made my own grid paper in undergrad. It started late one night after all the bookstores were closed and I ran out mid-problem in dynamics class. The Professor took off points for not using grid paper so I made my own out of Excel grids(I wrote on the flip side). I didn't lose any points and continued for the remainder of the semester. At the time, the university printer computer labs did not have a printer quota.
Zikes
I'm surprised it doesn't have a feature for intermittent breakpoints, like every 5th or 10th interval. I find that very useful for small size grid-lined paper.

Still, this is very nice, it's easy to see the potential for other features.

mayoff
My favorite graph paper: http://whitelines.se/function/
nacs
They have a patent on white lines on slightly greyed paper? Amazing.
mongol
Maybe not the idea itself but a method to print it?
jws
Nope.

Claim 1: white-ish lines on light grey paper.

Claim 2: As above, but more closely matching white and grey.

Claim 3: Either of the above but with a slightly colored paper instead of gray.

Kliment
Make sure to give those immoral fucks not the slightest bit of income.
psychometry
Great idea, but a buggy website and their Amazon store is displaying ridiculous prices for some items: http://www.amazon.com/Whitelines-Orange-Glue-Squared-Notepad...
slang800
The 2300USD listing is from some separate seller called "Stork Group", not Whitelines. And they describe it as "Brand new and unread!", so they probably have no idea what the item is.
aye
Not to mention the fact that they do a terrible idea conveying what they're actually selling -- there's nothing that says simply "it's grey paper with white lines."

"On Whitelines there is no visual interference between the lines and the pen colour."

So, the lines on the paper are different depending on the color of the ink I'm writing with?

ArcticCelt
The description we find on websites about the services or products they sell, are in almost every single case pretty bad.

I always end up going to Wikipedia to understand what the company is selling.

robotys
And i've just thought about this like yesterday on my own.
metaverse0
Beautiful. Can someone please make a printable version...
aye 

    .line {
        background: rgb(233, 233, 233);
        height: 3.125em;
        border: 0.25em solid white;
        width: 100%;    
    }
bigd
I'm assuming OP is the author:

very nice idea, very nice execution. Few things that imho need to be fixed (probably fast fixes): 1) Ensure that the print settings are correct. i.e. the pattern get splitted on two pages, for no reason. 2) resizing the browser window stretches/squeezes the picture. You shoud probably listen to the resize events and re-trigger the generation, change the patterns to some css, or simply set the generated image as cover. 3) translate the code in english. In softwares, having standards is a good thing.

mikhuang
looks fun! being able to input specific dimensions would be nice, e.g. 5mm or .25" grid
Intermernet
I agree, the only thing this is missing is actual units (both metric and imperial).
chrissyb
Additionally being able to add a scale bar would be a tidy feature.
jws
I still buy preprinted grid paper and staff paper. It is extraordinarily difficult to force a printer to use the exact same width on each line. There are just too many layers of abstraction between the browser/document and the hardware.
ohwp
Most of the time the 'smart' printer software is to blame. But I think if you stick to world units and print at 100% you will be fine.

Remember that dpi only controls print quality not print measurements. One cm printed at 300dpi will have the same length as one cm at 72dpi.

jws
The problem comes in the thin lines. If they don't fall exactly on the hardware pixel boundaries they will vary in weight. If you can get the printer to think in monochrome instead of some larger dithering cell you have a chance.
qwerty_asdf
There's also that pesky bugaboo about being permitted to own a genuinely accurate printer, and whether or not you'd use it to counterfeit money.
WWLink
My canon mx860 can actually do this straight from its menu haha. There's a few options for college ruled, wide ruled, and grid paper. This web app has more choices, but the printer makes some amazing paper as is :D
dredmorbius
Seems like something TeX or LaTeX could do.
mjcohen
How about fancier graphing paper: Gaussian, log-normal with specified parameters, ...