With small pages like that I generally organize to print them 2 to a page—it doesn’t shrink them much when printing to A4, similarly with 8.5×11 (91.8% and 91.7% respectively—the critical edge changes, but the loss in size is essentially the same). At nearly 92% the loss in readibility is minimal, and halves the paper used.

It’s only with journals I find hard to read—a few use small or unclear fonts already that my ageing eyes can’t deal well with—that I go to 1 per page and make it big.

Good idea, Glen. I’d like to reformat the PDF file to span a full page, but the LaTeX source I submitted for the article has been edited at various points and I don’t have the final LaTeX source to recompile with a new page size. I’ve looked in the Acrobat menu to see if I can make the default print setup as two pages per side in the PDF file, but the Print Setup menu option seems to leave that setting to the printer-specific setup. So this may be something the user has to specify when printing. If I’m missing something, maybe someone here will let me know. Thanks for the advice. — Ron

Those of us interested in continuing the propagation of nomography salute you!

Thanks, Joe! People here should be aware that you were way ahead of me on spreading the word on nomograms. For other readers: When I first started looking for information, Joe’s site was one of the very, very few that discussed nomography, and Joe has also recently published an important article on nomography in a medical journal (see the nomography section of Joe’s website). — Ron

A really fine article.

Thank you for your contributions to keeping nomography alive, and growing. I will print the resistor nomograms and use them in place of exercising my brain. The added detail and explanations in this article are appreciated.

Thanks, Scott. It occurs to me that the resistor nomograms might be really, really useful if standard resistor values were marked on the scales. Then if someone needs a particular resistance that is non-standard (as they often are), they could place the straightedge on this value on the middle scale and play with the angle of the straightedge to see what two standard resistors in parallel will provide the nearest resistance to the desired one. This is something that can’t be done on a calculator. If you or anyone reading this would like me to add markers for standard resistor values to the scales, let me know and I’ll do that and provide a link here to download the new versions. — Ron