Printable blank timeline

The heavy rule with a tick into every row is the whole drawing. A two-column table of dates and events carries exactly the same information and does not read as time passing; a spine does, because the eye follows it and the ticks are stops along it. It is worth pointing at when the sheet is handed over — the line is the century, and each tick is a place on it.

What it records is order rather than scale, and it is worth saying so out loud: the rows are all the same height, so a gap of a hundred years and a gap of two weeks take up the same amount of paper. That is the right trade for a life, a reign or the events of a book. For a period where the *distances* are the lesson — how long the Romans were here against how recent the war is — a scaled line is the honest drawing, and a printable number line is on the charts shelf.

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.