Planner Insert Sizes: Which One Actually Fits Your Planner (and Your iPad)

I printed eleven pages of a habit tracker last spring, carried them over to the hole punch feeling very organized about my life, and discovered that the holes wanted to go straight through the first column. Not near it. Through it.

The file was fine. The printer was fine. I had sent a Half Letter page to a printer set to "fit to page," on paper that was US Letter, and it had helpfully shrunk everything by about four percent to make it look nice — which moved every margin I had carefully measured.

So let's talk about insert sizes, because this is the part nobody explains before you buy, and it's the part that decides whether a page drops in or fights you.

Short version: there are six sizes worth knowing, and they split cleanly into two jobs. If your planner lives on a screen, you want GoodNotes Standard or iPad 4:3. If it lives in a binder, you want the page size that matches the paper you'll actually print on — US Letter or A4 for full-size, A5 or Half Letter for the small ones. A5 and Half Letter are not the same size, which is the single most common mix-up, and the one that costs you a stack of paper.

What is a planner insert size, actually?

A planner insert size is the page size the PDF was built at — the actual width and height of the sheet, before any printer touches it. Match it to the paper or the app you're using and the page lands at full size with its margins intact. Mismatch it and your printer quietly scales the whole page a few percent to make it fit, which is why the holes stop lining up and the lines stop looking like the preview.

That's it. It isn't a quality setting or a file format. It's a measurement, and measurements either match or they don't.

The six sizes, side by side

Here's what each of the six is, in points (the unit PDFs are actually built in — 72 points to the inch), inches, and millimeters. These are the exact page dimensions my inserts are generated at, so you can check them against your own planner with a ruler before you print anything.

One clarification on the first two rows: GoodNotes Standard and iPad 4:3 are screen-shaped pages, not paper standards. I've listed their measurements because a PDF page has real dimensions whether or not it ever meets a printer — but nobody is cutting paper to 271 × 361mm. Those two are for the tablet; the other four are for the tray.

Look at A5 and Half Letter for a second. A5 is 148mm wide and 210mm tall. Half Letter is 140mm wide and 216mm tall. Eight millimeters narrower, six millimeters taller — close enough to look identical in a product photo, far enough apart that one will not sit happily in the other's binder. If you have ever bought "A5 inserts" and found them a touch too tall for your rings, that's the gap you were feeling.

I put together The Color-Confident Crafter Kit — four free downloads I wish someone had handed me when I was printing things at four percent too small. It's yours for an email, and I only write when I actually have something worth saying.

Why does halving Letter change the shape, but halving A4 doesn't?

This is my favorite piece of paper trivia, and it's also the practical answer to "why do my US-size pages look squashed when I shrink them."

Run the numbers from the table. A4 is 1.415 times taller than it is wide. A5 — which is literally an A4 sheet folded in half — is 1.417. Same shape. That's the whole design of the A series: every fold keeps the proportions, so an A4 layout scales down onto A5 and still looks like itself.

Now US Letter: 1.294 tall-to-wide. Fold it in half and you get Half Letter at 1.545. Taller and skinnier. Not the same shape at all. So when you take a Letter-sized page and tell your printer to fit it onto Half Letter paper, you don't get a smaller version of your page — you get a smaller version with empty bands on two sides, and every margin shifted.

Which is why "just print it smaller" works in Europe and quietly fails in the States. It isn't your printer being difficult. It's two different centuries of paper standards sitting in the same print dialog.

Measure twice, print once. (The old saying is about cutting, but the paper is the thing you can't un-cut.)

So which size should you pick?

Three questions, in this order, and you're done.

1. Screen or paper? If you're writing with a stylus in GoodNotes, Notability, Noteshelf or any PDF annotation app, go digital-native: GoodNotes Standard if you want a page that behaves like the app's own paper, iPad 4:3 if you want it to fill the screen edge to edge with nothing wasted. Printing is a different question entirely, and you can always do both — same file, same download.

2. If paper: what's in your printer right now? Not what's in your binder. What's in the tray. US Letter and A4 print one page per sheet, no cutting. A5 and Half Letter are small pages — you print them on Letter or A4 and cut, which is fine and normal, but it means your tray stock decides which small size cuts cleanly. Half Letter is exactly half a Letter sheet. A5 is exactly half an A4 sheet. Use the one that matches your paper and you cut once, straight down the middle, no measuring.

3. If paper: what are you punching into? A5 binders and discs take A5. Half-size US binders and most discbound systems take Half Letter. Full-size three-ring takes Letter; full-size two- and four-ring takes A4. If you genuinely don't know which one you own, measure the page that's already in there — that's faster and more reliable than any chart, including mine.

And if you're stuck between two, pick the one that matches your paper. The binder is a one-time annoyance; the paper is every single time.

(Small aside on the stuck part: a six-way choice over a small download will stall you far longer than it deserves, because the cost of choosing wrong feels like the cost of the whole project. It isn't. It's one reprint.)

This is the part where I tell you what I actually sell, because it's the honest answer to the question this whole article is about: if you don't know which size you need, don't pick one. Every insert in my shop ships all six.

The Dot Grid insert is the one I reach for most — bullet journaling, sketching, planning a layout before committing to it. The Wide Ruled insert is for actual writing, generously spaced. The Graph Paper insert is for anything where the squares matter. All three come as 24 PDFs: the six sizes above, each in portrait and landscape, each in light and dark. You download once and you have every version of that page you will ever need, forever, including the one you didn't know you'd need until your printer ran out of Letter.

If you'd rather start with a spread of paper styles than a single page, the Printable Paper Bundle has seven styles in one download — three line spacings, two grid densities, dot grid — as PDF, PNG and SVG. Worth knowing before you click: that one is an older set, and it comes in Letter and A5 only, not the full six. Different trade, and I'd rather say so than let you find out at the print dialog.

Why does my printed insert come out slightly too small?

Because of one checkbox, almost every time.

In your print dialog, find the scaling option. It will probably say "Fit to printable area" or "Shrink oversized pages," and it will probably be on by default. That setting shrinks your page by three or four percent to clear your printer's unprintable edge margin. Harmless on a photo. Fatal on an insert, where the whole point is that the holes and the margins sit where they're supposed to.

Set it to 100% or "Actual size" instead. If a sliver of the outer edge gets clipped, that's your printer's hardware margin, not a problem with the file — and on an insert, the outer edge is the part you were going to trim anyway.

The other giveaway: if your page prints centered with equal white bands top and bottom, you sent a Letter-shaped page to A4 paper, or the reverse. Different sizes, remember, not just different numbers.

Portrait or landscape? Light or dark?

Portrait for anything you'll punch into a binder — that's what the rings expect. Landscape earns its keep on a screen, where an iPad held sideways in a keyboard case is genuinely more comfortable to write on than one standing up.

Dark mode is the one people don't think to ask for and then won't give up. On a tablet at night it's the difference between a page and a flashlight. On paper it's a quick way to use most of a toner cartridge, so: screens only, and I say that as someone who learned it the expensive way.

Each of my inserts ships all of these combinations in the one download — six sizes, each in portrait and landscape, each in light and dark, 24 PDFs total. That's deliberate: I don't know what's in your printer tray or which app you opened, and I'd rather you never have to come back and ask for a different size.

What I still can't tell you

Two honest gaps, because a size chart that pretends to be complete is worse than one that admits where it stops.

The first: hole spacing. Page size and punch pattern are separate problems. An A5 page fits an A5 binder, but six-ring, discbound and three-ring all want their holes in different places, and I build the pages with margins generous enough to punch rather than with holes pre-placed. You punch to your system. I'd rather hand you a page that works in all of them than guess at yours.

The second: "personal," "pocket," "B6" and the brand-specific sizes. Those are real sizes that real people use, and they aren't standardized the way A5 and Half Letter are — the numbers shift between manufacturers. I don't ship those, so I'm not going to print dimensions for them here and let you cut paper based on a figure I can't check. If that's your system, measure the page in your binder. I'm still figuring out whether it's worth adding them; if you'd use one, that's genuinely useful for me to know.

FAQ

Is A5 the same as Half Letter?
No, and this is the one that trips up the most people. A5 is 148 × 210mm (5.83 × 8.26in). Half Letter is 140 × 216mm (5.5 × 8.5in). Half Letter is narrower and taller. They look alike on a screen and will not swap in a binder.

Can I print A5 inserts on US Letter paper?
Yes. Print at 100% or "Actual size," not "fit to page," and trim. You'll have a margin left over because A5 isn't half of Letter — if you want a clean fold-and-cut with nothing wasted, use the Half Letter version on Letter paper, or the A5 version on A4.

Which size should I use for GoodNotes?
GoodNotes Standard if you want the page to behave like the app's native paper, or iPad 4:3 if you want it filling the whole screen with no bars at the edges. Both import the same way; it's a preference, not a correctness thing.

Which size fits a discbound planner?
Half-size discbound systems generally take Half Letter, and full-size take Letter. Disc punch patterns vary by brand, so measure the page already in yours before you print a stack.

Do I have to buy the insert twice if I use it on paper and on my iPad?
No. One download includes all six sizes in both orientations and both light and dark — 24 PDFs. Print one, import another, same purchase.

Keep making

So: measure the page you already have, match the paper in your tray, set the scale to 100%, and the rest of this is just preference. That's the entire discipline.

Try it on one page before you commit to a whole planner's worth — and if you've got a binder size I haven't covered, tell me which one. I keep a list, and it's how most of what I make gets decided.

Start with the Dot Grid insert if you want one page that covers every size in both modes, or grab The Color-Confident Crafter Kit — four free downloads, yours for an email.

Read next

• How to Add Pages to Your Digital Planner in GoodNotes — once you've picked a size, this is how it gets into the app.
• SVG vs PNG vs PDF: Which File Do You Actually Need? — why inserts are PDFs and not something else.
• Christmas Planner Printables: The 7 Pages That Actually Save December — a worked example of building a small system out of single pages.

Kassandra Zimmerman — Hi, I'm Kassie, the one-woman team behind Digisperse. With a background in drafting, programming & design, I make print-ready vectors, fonts, color charts, die cuts & stickers — every file checked by hand and ready to use.

Keep it sunny,
— Kassie