Printable Checklist Maker

About printing a checklist

A checklist you actually use is one that hangs on a wall, sits on a clipboard, or lives on the fridge — somewhere you walk past. You need it on paper, with boxes big enough to tick with whatever pen is lying there.

Most tools get the last part wrong. A checkbox in a web page is about three millimetres across and is often dropped entirely by the printer, because browsers treat form controls as something to fill in on screen rather than something to print.

This draws the boxes. They are real squares in the PDF — vector, black, and as big as you ask for — so what comes out of the printer is a form you can tick.

Sections

Start a line with a # and it becomes a heading. So # Kitchen on its own line, then Wipe the counters and Empty the bin under it, then # Bathroom, and the printed list comes out grouped under two headings with a rule beneath each.

That is usually the difference between a list you scan and a list you follow. Blank lines are ignored, so you can space things out while typing without leaving gaps on the page.

One box, or a week of them

• One box per line — the ordinary checklist. Packing, shopping, a handover, a pre-flight.
• Several boxes per line — the same list with a row of boxes across it, and a heading over each column. Seven boxes with Mon to Sun gives you a chore chart or a habit tracker for the week; two or three work for "check, sign, filed".

The column headings are yours to change — they are just a comma-separated list, so Morning, Noon, Night works as well as the days of the week.

The settings that matter on paper

• Text and box size — one setting moves both together, so the writing never looks lost next to the square. Small fits a long list on one page. Large is for something a child will tick, or for a clipboard you fill in with gloves on.
• Line spacing — roomy leaves space to add items by hand, which every real checklist eventually needs.
• Columns — two columns fit roughly twice as much on a page, and suit short items like a shopping list.
• A line to write on — prints a faint rule after each item, for notes or a signature.

Everything is black on white. No coloured headers, no shaded rows, nothing that drains an ink cartridge to print a list.

Nothing is uploaded

The PDF is built in your browser with a real PDF library, so it is crisp at any print size, and Latin text stays selectable in a PDF reader. Your list is never sent anywhere, which matters more than it sounds: checklists tend to contain addresses, medication routines, client names and the layout of your house. The only thing ever downloaded is a font, and only when you type in a language the built-in fonts cannot draw.

The preview is the finished PDF rendered page by page, not an approximation of it, so what you see is what prints.

What people print

• A cleaning rota for the fridge door
• A packing list that lives in the suitcase
• A chore chart with a column per day
• An opening or closing checklist for a shop or kitchen
• A handover or shift checklist that gets signed
• A habit tracker for the week

Good to know

• Output is a real PDF — vector lines and text, not a picture of a list, so it is crisp at any print size
• Every page carries a small grey line at its foot — *Created at https://appandtools.com/tool/…* — so a sheet that ends up on a wall can be traced back to what made it. Turn it off in one click if you would rather it were not there. A QR code for the same address sits beside it, so a phone can reopen the tool straight from the printed sheet.
• It flows onto as many pages as it needs, and each page after the first repeats the column headings
• Japanese, Korean and Chinese work. Type in one of them and the page fetches a font that can draw it, once, then draws those letters as shapes rather than as text. They print perfectly and the file stays small; the trade is that text in those languages cannot be selected or searched inside the PDF
• Other scripts fall back to the built-in PDF fonts, which cover letters, numbers and Western European accents; anything outside that is replaced with "?" and the page tells you it happened
• To turn an existing document into a PDF instead, use Markdown to PDF or Word to PDF
• To put several of these onto one sheet, print them and use your printer's own "pages per sheet" setting
• To sign the printed-and-scanned result, use Sign PDF

How to use it

• Give the list a title, and a second line if you want a name-and-date space
• Type the items, one per line — press Enter and keep going
• Start a line with # to break the list into sections
• Choose one box for a plain checklist, or several with day headings for a weekly chart
• Set the text and box size and line spacing to suit whoever is holding the pen
• Press Download PDF and print it

Related tools

• Markdown to PDF — for a document rather than a list
• Invoice Generator — the same idea, for billing
• Sign PDF — sign a printed and scanned copy
• Add Page Numbers to PDF — number a longer print-out
• Online Notepad — draft the list first
• Sort List — put the items in order before you print