What you get, and what you do not
Every file on this page is a blank. There are no stock photographs in them, no invented headlines and no decorative flourishes you would have to spend an afternoon removing. What each one has instead is the exact page size a named printer asks for, their margin on the edges they ask for it on, their bleed where they require any, and a column grid that fits inside all of it.
That is a deliberate choice and it is worth explaining, because the obvious alternative is a gallery of finished designs. The trouble with finished designs is that a layout built for a school paper is wrong for a wedding paper and wrong again for a property listing, so most people end up deleting the design and keeping only the page setup. The page setup is the part that is genuinely hard to get right and genuinely expensive to get wrong, so that is the part we make.
It is also the part most template libraries get wrong. A template offered as a newspaper template is usually 11 by 17 inches with half inch margins on all four edges, which is correct for one American printer and incorrect for every British and Dutch one. Ours are generated per format from the same dataset that drives the calculators on this site, so a template cannot disagree with the specification page next to it. If a printer revises a margin, the next build reissues every affected file.
The four file types
A single guide page at the full document size, including bleed where the format takes any, with the trim in black, the printer's required printable area in cyan and the column grid in grey. Place it on a locked background layer in whatever you design in, build on top of it, then hide that layer before you export. It also carries a proper TrimBox, so a preflight tool will read the finished size correctly.
SVG
The same geometry in an editable file. All of the guides sit in one group named guides, so when the layout is finished you delete that group and you are left with your artwork on a correctly sized artboard. Opens in Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape and Figma.
InDesign script
A plain text .jsx file that builds the document for you: page size, page count, margins, columns and, on the one format that needs it, four separate bleed offsets. Setting different bleed on different edges is not something the New Document dialog will do in one pass, which is exactly why the script exists. Because it is text, you can read every line before you run it.
Word
A real .docx with the page size, margins and column count already set, and a masthead and some replaceable body text to type over. It exists because a great many school and community newspapers are written by people who have Word and nothing else. Word cannot handle bleed and will not accept a page over 22 inches, so one format here has no Word file and its page explains why.
The one number that is ours
Everything in these files comes from a printer except the gutter, the gap between columns. There is no published figure for it because it is a design decision rather than a press constraint, so we use four millimetres on the metric printers and one pica on the American one, and the files say so. The column widths on each format's page are worked out from that gutter, so if you prefer a different one the arithmetic is all visible and easy to redo.
The other place we are stricter than the printer is the inside edge. Several formats ask for a margin on the top, bottom and outside edge only, which means you are technically allowed to run text into the fold. The grid in our files does not, because text in a fold is not read. Both boundaries are drawn separately in every PDF and SVG, so you can always see which is the rule and which is the advice.
Before you send anything to a printer
A correct template will not save a file with the wrong page count, and page count is the rule people break most often. Most of these formats print in multiples of four; one prints in multiples of eight with a sixteen page floor; one printer publishes no rule at all. Each format's page states which, and the margin and safe area calculator will check a page count for you against the format you have chosen.
Check your images too. Newsprint absorbs ink and loses detail, and a photograph that looks fine on screen is often well below what the printer needs at the size you are placing it. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution at the printed size. And if you have not started writing yet, the words to pages estimator will tell you roughly how much paper your draft is going to need before you commit to a page count.
Full specifications for all twelve formats, including colour handling, resolution limits and minimum font sizes, are on the print sizes pages. Where our figures came from and how we check them is set out in the methodology.