Printable blank flashcards

The cut lines sit on the boundaries between the cards, and the outside trim is one of them. There is no gutter, which is the design rather than an omission — a shared edge means one cut makes two cards, and a gutter would mean two cuts and a strip of waste at every boundary. Whatever paper is left over is split evenly to the left and to the right instead, so a stack of cut sheets is square with itself rather than a sixteenth wider down one side.

The card is a whole number of eighths of an inch, which is what makes the dimension above checkable: hold a ruler against one and it says three and three quarters. A size like 3.734 would be a truer fit to the page and no use to anybody. There is no printed back, deliberately — duplex on a home printer lands within about an eighth of an inch and lands there asymmetrically — so write both sides on the same face, or switch the fold on in the builder and get a card that stands up like a tent.

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.