Hexagonal · 5 mm Flat-Top on Legal · Portrait

About this template

A flat-top regular hexagonal grid with 5 mm pitch. Hexagons tessellate the plane with the same symmetry as a triangular lattice but with no shared edges between adjacent cells, which makes them ideal for tabletop game maps and chemistry organic-molecule sketching. See also: A short reading list on technical drawing standards can help you put any of these grids in their historical and standards-based context.

Best used for

• Tabletop strategy and wargame maps
• Organic-chemistry skeletal sketches
• Ceramic and architectural tile patterns
• Molecular-biology amino-acid diagrams

Why Legal in portrait

8.5×14" - useful when a section needs extra vertical run, or for elevation strips and long timeline diagrams. The portrait orientation gives you 216 mm of horizontal run and 356 mm of vertical, which suits tall subjects - elevations, sections, single-column drawings - where the eye reads top-to-bottom. Trim and bleed allowances on consumer printers will normally remove a 5 mm strip from each edge; this grid is generated to remain measurable even after that trim, with no critical content placed inside the printer-margin band.

Standards and lineage

Hexagonal lattice convention used in IUPAC organic chemistry nomenclature. The Legal sheet itself follows US Loose, and the title-block conventions assumed by this template come from ISO 5457:1999 - the international standard governing how technical drawings are framed, dated, and signed. Background reading: See our scale-and-projection guides for a deeper dive on how all the standards in this lineage interact in practice.

A short history of this grid

Hex paper became fashionable in the 1970s wargaming community after Avalon Hill standardised hex maps for their tabletop campaigns.

Printing notes

For accurate output, print at 100 % scale - never "fit to page", which silently shrinks the sheet by 4–6 % and breaks every measured cell. Use a laser printer if the grid will be traced over with ink, since inkjet inks bleed through technical pen and pencil. If your printer cannot handle the full Legal sheet, scale the SVG to the next-smaller paper size before printing - every GridCraft grid is delivered as vector artwork so it scales cleanly. The downloaded SVG carries the physical sheet dimensions in millimetres, so a compliant print driver should print at 1:1 by default. Our how-to-print guide walks through the calibration test in 30 seconds.

Designer's note

Specialty grids reward the discipline of choosing the right sheet for the right drawing. A Hexagonal · 5 mm Flat-Top on Legal is not a one-size-fits-all sheet - it's a calibrated tool for a specific class of problem. Use it where the page suits the drawing; reach for a different sheet when it doesn't. The catalogue is large precisely so you don't have to compromise on the projection, scale or sheet size.