Most home printers are helpful to a fault. They see an A4 PDF and offer to “fit it to page”, which quietly shrinks the sheet by a few percent. The grid still looks fine on screen, but the printed cells are smaller than designed.
The three settings that matter
- Paper: A4. Not Letter, not A5.
- Scale: 100%. Turn off “fit to page” or “scale to fit”.
- Margins: default or none. The PDF already has 12 mm margins.
If your print dialog has a preview, check that the sheet fills the page without a white border on one side. That is usually a sign that the printer is scaling.
A quick ruler test
Print one page. Measure the outside of the grid. On a 10 × 10 tracker the sheet should be 210 mm wide. If it is 203 mm, the printer scaled it to about 97%.
Paper and toner
Ordinary 80 g/m² paper is fine. For a sheet that will be coloured with a marker, 100–120 g/m² feels nicer and does not bleed through as much. Use black-and-white mode if you want to save toner; the grid stays readable.
One last thing
Write the date on the back. In three months, the sheet becomes a small record of what you did, not just a plan.
Make your own tracker — it takes about a minute.