Generate printable Chinese composition paper — 400 or 300 character cells, optional centre gutter, on A4, A5 or B5. Cells are sized from the character count.

It fixes the character count, not the square size

This is the fundamental difference from grid paper, and the reason 稿紙 needs a page of its own rather than a checkbox on that one.

Grid paper starts from the square — 5 mm — and asks how many fit on a sheet. Manuscript paper starts from the other end: a sheet holds a set number of characters, usually 20 columns × 20 rows = 400, and the cells are then sized to fit. So “400-character paper” describes the sheet’s capacity, not its dimensions.

Which means 400-character paper on A4 has visibly larger cells than 400-character paper on A5. Both are 400-character paper; both are correct.

Cells are always square. Chinese characters occupy a square body, and a rectangular cell stretches or squashes every character written into it — so the narrower axis decides the cell size and the other axis carries the slack.

The centre gutter

The blank vertical band down the middle is the 中縫, also called 版心, dividing the page into two halves.

It is inherited from thread-bound books. A printed sheet was folded in half with the text outward, and the 中縫 was precisely where the fold landed — classical editions printed the book title, volume and page number there, and the 魚尾 (“fishtail”) mark in the middle was the registration guide for folding accurately.

Modern composition paper keeps it for more practical reasons: each half stays complete when the sheet is folded, and binding does not run through the writing. You can switch it off, in which case the columns run as one continuous block.

A gutter requires an even number of columns — it passes through the exact middle, and an odd number of columns has no exact middle to pass through.

400 or 300

Both are common. 400 (20×20) is the standard for submissions, writing competitions and most school assignments. 300 (20×15) appears more in primary school, where fewer cells on the same sheet means larger, easier ones.

Actual rulings are not standardised across publishers or schools — line weights, whether cells are numbered, and how punctuation cells are marked all vary. What this generates is the common form: evenly spaced square cells, an optional centre gutter, and no decoration.

Punctuation takes a cell too

Worth knowing if you are writing on this paper rather than printing it for someone else, because it changes how much text actually fits:

A full stop, comma, enumeration comma, semicolon or colon occupies one whole cell, positioned bottom-left of that cell.
Each half of a quotation mark or bracket takes its own cell.
The dash (——) and ellipsis (……) take two cells each, and may not be split across two lines.
Punctuation may not begin a line. If it falls there, it shares the previous cell with the character before it.

So the 400 characters a sheet holds are 400 cells including every punctuation mark.

Printing

Print at 100%, not “fit to page” — fitting rescales the whole sheet and the cells stop being the size that was calculated. Everything here is computed in millimetres and rendered in millimetres, with no conversion to pixels anywhere, so what comes out of the printer matches what the page says.

Nothing is uploaded

The sheet is drawn by your browser and printed by your printer. No server is involved.