Printable award certificates

It prints landscape without anybody choosing landscape. A certificate is a landscape document, the sheet carries its own paper, and the page rule follows the sheet — so pressing print gives a certificate the right way round rather than a portrait one somebody has to notice and rotate in the dialog. That is the single commonest thing wrong with a printable certificate, and it costs a reprint every time.

The line that matters is "For". A certificate for great work is wallpaper; a certificate for finishing the seven times table, or for reading every night for a month, is a record of a specific thing that happened, and it is the specificity that makes a child keep it. The double rule is set in from the cut rather than against it, so a cut a thirty-second of an inch out trims paper instead of slicing through the border.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.