How come lab notebooks are ridiculously expensive? Also, I guess most notebooks are slightly bigger than composition notebooks
I'm tempted to make a spreadsheet template or PDF. It's pretty silly to spend a lot of money on a lab notebook when you can print a few grid pages and bind the book yourself
Current status
Hmmm...
My DIY lab notebook sheet came out OK, I think. But I don’t think I can align the grids exactly so the front matches the back (noticeable on cheap office paper). Then again, I guess there’s only so much you can do with a spreadsheet and an old printer
https://mastodon.social/media/lPzJ-WL9Uju-_MN6x7Q
https://mastodon.social/media/mUflm80rmdygErMkPSY
@cypnk on Linux at least, cells where I explicitly put bold borders retain them in the PDF just fine. By default cells get no borders in PDF, like printing.
@hisham_hm I did select to preserve the grid in the print settings, but I guess this is a Windows version specific issue. On Linux, the export showed nice clear border styles
@cypnk time to file a bug, then!
DIY Printable Lab Notebook
https://github.com/cypnk/Lab-Notebook
I'm releasing the spreadsheet into the public domain. I had a minor issue exporting to PDF, but if you have LibreOffice, it should work fine
Gather enough sheets and you can do a perfect bind yourself
@cypnk I could use that as a base for my music arrangement sheets. I know I could have made one in spreadsheet, but when you've done most of the work and I just have to edit some headings ...
Thanks for sharing it 😄
@cypnk My ancient version of Open Office chokes on it. Time for an update to Libre, I think
@Stringbender I did this in LibreOffice so that may have something to do with it
It should both work since the format is standard, but I guess newer versions are a bit different for both
@cypnk All sorted now - got Libre in and running.
@cypnk That looks pretty neato! I think I'm going to give it a try, Thank you 😃
@cypnk LaTeX would be a better choice for something like that.
@loke If I'm having it professionally printed, sure (come to think of it Rustic Cyberpunk brand lab notebooks is a brilliant idea 🤔)
But the target demographic for this is stressed out college kids/high school kids, parents not wanting to buy overpriced stationary, craft people etc... So "better" is relative
Most are already familiar with spreadsheets and they can get it customized and printed very quickly. Getting any of them to learn LaTeX is a bit like getting a Word user to learn Vim 😅
@cypnk @loke When I wanted to/needed to do something similar, I wrote a Python program (using ReportLab) to generate the lines I wanted on a PDF directly. This is not necessarily the recommended procedure, but it did produce a nice notebook page template with lines for italic calligraphy, in a variety of sizes.
I was hoping LibreOffice's PDF export would preserve the grid boldness and other formatting. Alas, at least on Windows, all the grid lines seem to be very faint after export :(
I'm making a downloadable LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet for anyone who wants to print their own lab notebook. The paper size is US-Letter, but it should fit fine into A4 size. The grids are set at 5mm, which is pretty standard