Dear Lazyweb

[pseudomonas]

I have some nice new nibs, yay retail therapy. Also some nice ink (black & dark red).

Is there a device that will make easier the task of ruling, say, a postcard with an even array of, say, 5mm-spaced horizontal lines? I guess a piece of graph paper with a hole in it that I can fasten down would do it.

Comments

[zotz]

I think I have a device that will do that. It's an inkjet printer.

[pseudomonas]

Ah, sorry, I should've said, I meant erasable pencil lines.

[pne]

Well, that's simple, then - just put graphite dust into the ink cartridges.

[naath]

A proper drawing board should have an arrangement with two rulers perpendicular to each other to make this sort of task easier. Unfortunately they tend to the large and expensive.

I did at one point have a ruler with a cylinder set into it - you rolled the ruler down the paper to get parallel lines (the cylinder was marked in mm so you could get evenly spaced lines). A bit tricky to do right. Heffers A&G might have such a device?

[pseudomonas]

An A4 drawing board is probably something I'd get good use out of. Roller-rulers: good plan.

[feanelwa]

Ooh yes I used to have one of those ruler things, my grandma bought it for Christmas one year, but the shop she bought it from and her memory of the shop probably don't exist anymore...might have been a Woolies find :( anyway it was great though.

[pseudomonas]

Tindalls had one, but it was thirteen quid, so I didn't get it.

[pfy]

Is there a device that will make easier the task of ruling, say, a postcard with an even array of, say, 5mm-spaced horizontal lines?

I saw a pen nib for drawing music staves once. It had five tips, and reminded me of those multi-pen devices characters in The Beano used to use when the teacher gave them lines as a punishment. The spacing was fixed, though, so its usefulness for other tasks was limited.

[pseudomonas]

I have one of those! It's good fun, but very hard to get even width lines. Maybe it needs filing down or something.

[hatam_soferet]

A nice drawing board is a wonderful tool. Roller rulers tend to slip unless you're very very careful - enough of a pain in the arse that just measuring the damn lines from the edge of the page ends up being easier.

You can also print lines onto a piece of paper, flip it over and rub graphite over the back, and then re-flip it and draw over the lines with a stylus (such as A PENCIL), thus transferring the graphite to the paper. Carbon paper will save you the diddling about with graphite, but is harder to remove afterwards.

[pseudomonas]

I think I may ask the parentheses for such a board for a birthday present :)

[hatam_soferet]

Oooh, good idea.