What this template is

A menu printed as a newspaper solves a real problem: it is cheap enough to reprint when the kitchen changes, which means the menu can be honest about what is actually available today. The layout is a grid of dishes, each with a picture, a name, a line of description and a price, filling whichever page size you choose.

The inside page is prose. A piece about where the food comes from and a second section for drinks, with a pull quote. That page is what turns a menu into something a customer reads while they wait rather than scans and puts down.

How to fill it in

One line of description per dish, and let it be a list of things rather than a sentence. Lemon, garlic, chips or salad tells a diner more than a paragraph about provenance, and it fits.

Prices without currency symbols read cleanly on a menu and that is how the template sets them, but do whatever your local convention expects. What matters is that the price is on its own line, which is what makes a menu scannable.

Photographs are optional and the grid works without them. If you do not have good pictures of the food, replace the photo boxes with a rule or a plain block; newsprint is unkind to badly lit food and a poor photograph does more damage than none.

What usually goes wrong

Allergen information is a legal requirement in many countries and the box on the front is a prompt rather than a solution. Find out what your jurisdiction requires and how it must be presented before you print; we cannot tell you, and getting it wrong is not a design problem.

The practical mistake is printing too many. The whole point of a newsprint menu is that it is cheap enough to throw away when the kitchen changes. Print a fortnight's worth.

The other is ink on hands. Newsprint marks, which is charming for a keepsake and less so at a table. Ask your printer about their digital stock, which sets harder.

Opening and editing the files

The PDF holds both pages and is the one to look at first. It is drawn at the exact document size for the format you chose, so printing it at a hundred percent gives you a true proof of the layout. Use it to check the design before you commit to editing anything.

The two SVGs are the editable version. Every headline, caption and paragraph is real text rather than an outline, so you can click into it and type. They open in Inkscape, which is free, and in Illustrator, Affinity Designer and Figma. The photograph placeholders are plain rectangles; delete one and put your own picture in its place, keeping to the same box so the text around it does not have to move.

The template is set in the standard PDF serif and sans faces, which is deliberate: they are the faces that exist everywhere, so the file looks the same on your machine as it does on ours and on the printer's. If you would rather use something else, the guide to newsprint fonts covers what survives at small sizes on absorbent paper, which is a narrower field than it looks.

Before you order

Check the page count rule for the format you have chosen. Most of the printers here work in multiples of four, one works in multiples of eight, and one publishes no rule at all. The margin and safe area calculator will check a page count against a format, and the format's own specification page carries the full rules on colour, resolution and export settings.

Check your photographs at the size you are actually printing them rather than at the size they look on screen. The image DPI checker gives you the effective resolution and tells you the largest a picture can safely go. Newsprint is absorbent and loses fine detail, so a photograph that is marginal on screen will be worse on paper.

Then export a proof PDF and run it through your printer's own preflight before you pay for anything. Every figure in this template came from that printer's published guidelines on the date shown below, but presses vary and guidelines get revised.

About the photographs

The pictures in these templates are placeholders and you are meant to replace them. They are here because a template with an empty grey box does not show you what your paper will look like, and because a page with a photograph on it is laid out differently from one without.

Every one is public domain or CC0, taken from Wikimedia Commons, and the build refuses any image whose licence asks for attribution. That rule exists for your sake rather than ours: an attribution requirement cannot survive somebody opening the file, deleting a caption and sending it to a press. So if you print these pages exactly as they are, including commercially, you owe nobody anything. The sources are listed anyway, because you should be able to check rather than take our word for it.

Figures on this page come from Newspaper Club artwork guidelines, read on 2026-08-20. Presses vary and printers revise their guidelines, so run a test PDF through their own preflight before you order.