As a college freshman, my physics professor took me aside and said that I'd never pass the course unless I could read my own handwriting. He pointed to several mistakes in my work that were obvious transcription errors from one line to the next.
He sent me to the college bookstore with a shopping list that included a pad of engineering paper and some mechanical pencils.
I'm sure that the psychological motivation was as important as the actual hardware, but my handwriting and my grades did improve after that.
I don't much see the point, these days; presuming you work in black, you can filter out the grids and guides of any light color (green, blue, etc.) just by scanning in color, picking out a color-curve that exists in black but not in the guides (e.g. red) and turning off the others.
Before digital image editing, some scanners and cameras were set up to automatically perform an equivalent to these steps by using a lens to filter out the blue channel, thus allowing graphic designers to sketch in blue "non-repro" pencil, ink on top of their sketch, and then have the sketch-lines disappear in the scan. But today, any random color can be your "non-repro" color if you have a copy of Photoshop Elements.
This reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote about sharing music without all of the Zune's software shinanigans to share a song for three plays
> It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected
I'm a dedicated engineering pad user myself, but I've never felt the need to scan the results, so I can't speak to that.
The reason I use it is that the grid just doesn't overwhelm the content in the way that it is with standard graph paper. Grid lines should always be muted -- the principle applies to graph paper as much as it does to charts.
Also you didn't mention it, but engineering pads also have the ten row grouping mentioned in the article.
I have a few sheets of K&E from my grandfather's, they're fantastic. I'm thinking about framing one.
My go-to is Staedtler, simply because it's available. My dad still uses a lot of National. I've also used Ampad, which I find to be a little thin, and the fibers are course: tends to gouge.
I'm unclear. I use bound Leuchtturm1917 books for note taking these days, and I used to use moleskine. I have a number of others, including a Rhodia and white lines. I am not aware of Rhodia selling what I would call an engineer's pad. Graph paper, yes. Engineer's pad, no. Can you cite a link?
The one he's using above in the images looks like the one from National Brand [1]. I recognize it because I use it to this day for all my work. Ever since engineering classes at RPI, it just helps organize my writing/sketching and for subsequent filing/reviewing. Highly recommend :)
Yes, an easy way to tell is it will also be light green/yellow. I only have experience with Comet brand from the campus store. It used to be kind of hard to find engineering paper at a decent price online, so I just stock up whenever I visit my alma mater. ~$20 for 500 sheets.
All my notebooks are graph paper. I wanted to use them for composition but my teachers complained. I explained quite correctly that with graph paper you had lines for text and bonus you could draw diagrams as well. How cool was that?
Apparently not cool enough, and one English teacher insisted on "wide rule" composition notebooks, it made me ill to write in it.
One of these days I'll buy enough Eureka Lab notebooks in a single order to have them customize them beyond the simple lab/engineering moniker. :-)
High school wasn't all fun, but one of the definite low points was breaking out one of your new notebooks and discovering that you accidentally bought a ten-pack of wide-rule notebooks.
I've been going through a lot of Khan Academy mathematics courses lately.
Oh, oh, how I wish I could have used graph paper for my math scratch paper in school. Writing out my work neatly is pretty much imperative for working through to the correct answer. I have a tendency to mis-transcribe from one step to another, and keeping everything neat helps with that.
Graph paper lets me line everything up not just horizontally but vertically, step by step, making it super obvious when I've accidentally, say, flipped a sign or missed a coefficient. All my math teachers in school insisted on wide rule, though...
Graph paper is also great for making tidy indented lists/outlines. I took notes on an iPad with Notability for about a year, and the graph papers made it very easy to keep notes organized when stuff scrolls off the screen.
These days, I am really impressed with the notebooks made by Vela Workings, they are at least as nice as Moleskine's offerings but at slightly better prices. Their E2 Engineer Research Notebook is my current favorite, and the N2 is a close second.
For those of you looking to improve your by-hand visual communication skills, a cool old book is _Thinking with a Pencil_ . I picked up a copy a few months ago, and have been enjoying working through the exercises as I find time (which also includes isometric techniques):
As far as the triangular grid goes, it's not common, but is very useful when you need it.
Ternary diagrams are probably the main use for it. They're particularly common in the geosciences as many classification schemes and solid-solution phase diagrams are defined in terms of a mixture of three components.
I used it through most of undergrad to make ternary diagrams by hand (and had to remember and draw in various classification schemes off the top of my head).
It's hard to find, so I would guess that professors are still handing out badly photocopied versions of an ancient sheet of triangular graph paper. (Sure it would be easy to create a nice blank ternplot with grids in $plotting_package_of_choice, but what's the fun in that??)
Its very much not hard to find triangular graph paper today. It may be hard to walk into a brick-and-mortar retail store and find it (though I wouldn't be surprised if campus bookstores in places where it was used in courses carried it), but its quite easy to find online, both printable and pre-printed.
So there's really no real reason anyone should be relying on "badly photocopied versions of an ancient sheet of triangular graph paper" (that's not saying that there aren't people doing it, just that there's no good reason for them to be doing it.)
I count 10 graph paper notebooks at arms length as I type this. I use the wonderful Japanese Maruman Mnemosyne notebooks and a fountain pen. People think I'm nuts, maybe I am but the combination brings me great joy.
This was the paper I loved for drawing Dungeons and Dragons maps in the late 70s. I loved how a #2 pencil looked on the faded blue grid. The paper has a distinctive smell, it's just delicious.
I was a fan of analytic geometry back in high school. It illuminates so many mathematical and physical facts and propositions. It also enables you to take a brute force approach to solving seemingly impossible problems - just graph the thing and see where the curves intersect.
Then at some point I discovered computers and realized the true magnitude and capabilities of numerical methods.
I recall using a lin-log and log-log graph paper when I was 16 or so.
I suspect we HAD to use them because the school had some leftovers. We drew graphs on them for like 20 mins and then did it on the computer (GeoGebra I think).
"Specialty graph paper" - wow... I had never suspected there was anything but the square grid - and I'm old enough to have used it in my teenage years !
Ugh, yeah, that's what they have here in France. Gives me a headache to look at my writing being criss-crossed by the overly heavy ruling :/
Perhaps i should sometime become un-lazy and look for some proper paper, rediscover the joy of writing :)
My other gripe is that my fountain pen keeps drying up (i use it too infrequently) and as a result i'm reduced to using those horrible throw-away BICs, at least they don't dry up. Does anyone have any golden tips for keeping fountain pens healthy?
Am I dating myself to say that at my right hand is a pad of graph paper? I take my notes on it; it's wonderful to have both horizontal and vertical guides.
Maybe. I used them through college some 20 years ago prefered the same for years afterwards but have switched to yellow legal pads for temp scratch surface and https://workflowy.com/ for note taking. Not sure why, but I like the yellow.
I have some old lab notebooks of my dad's from the 1950s. Also the india ink pens and lettering stencils he used to label figures in his thesis and other papers. All very high quality stuff and must have been pretty significant purchases for a grad student in those days.
I found various types of old graph paper in my father's desk when I cleaned it out. I've kept most of it. He's an EE and a ham radio operator, so he had lots of things to graph.
What it looks like in person: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Engineer...
What it looks like scanned: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wP_s3WyQd4A/S-s4B-sm4oI/AAAAAAAAAe...