Printable ring gauge and cigar ruler

How do you print a ring gauge at the right size?

Print at 100%, which most dialogs call Actual size, with every Fit option turned off. One wrong click and the whole sheet shrinks by a few percent. You won't see it by eye. Your cigars will.

1. Download the file for your paper: Letter in the US and Canada, A4 almost everywhere else.
2. Open the print dialog. In Adobe Acrobat Reader pick Actual size. In macOS Preview set Scale to 100%. In Chrome open More settings and set Scale to Default or 100, never Fit to printable area.
3. Print page 1 on plain paper. Print page 2 on card stock if your printer takes it.
4. Check the squares before you trust anything else on the sheet.

The calibration square tells you if the print is honest

The 1 inch square must measure exactly 1 inch, and the 2 cm square exactly 20 mm, with a real ruler or tape. If they do, every circle and tick on the sheet is right too, because they were all drawn to the same scale.

If the square comes out at 0.97 inch, your printer shrank the sheet to 97%. A 50 ring circle then prints as a 48.5. Go back to the print dialog and fix the scale. Don't adjust by eye.

How to measure a cigar with it

Ring gauge is the diameter in 64ths of an inch, so you measure the widest part of the cigar, not the head or the foot taper.

• Circles on page 1. Stand the cigar on its foot over the circles. The one whose edge lines up with the wrapper is the ring.
• Card on page 2. Cut the holes out with a craft knife on the dashed lines. Slide the foot through, small hole to large. The first hole it passes without squeezing is its ring gauge.
• Length. Cut a ruler strip out along its edge. Put the foot on the 0 line and read the tip of the cap. Six inches by 52 ring is what most shops call a toro.

A box-pressed cigar has no single diameter. Measure across the flats and across the corners and call it somewhere between. Hand-rolled cigars also run a ring or two off the box, so a 52 that fits the 50 hole is normal. Once you have the ring, the ring gauge converter turns it into millimeters and inches, and the size chart tells you which vitola it is.

Your screen can't show true size

A screen can't promise true size because the browser doesn't know how big your pixels are. Browsers treat an inch as 96 CSS pixels, then a phone, a laptop and a 4K monitor each stretch those pixels differently. So the preview above is a picture of the sheet, nothing more.

Paper is different. A PDF is measured in points, 72 to the inch, and a printer at 100% puts each point where it belongs. That's why the sheet carries its own check square. It proves the print, not the screen.

Printing this page prints the same sheet

Print this web page and the browser sends both sheets to the printer, sized in CSS inches, with half-inch margins. The rest of the page stays off the paper. Same rule applies: 100% scale, then measure the square. If your browser fights you, use the PDF.

Printable ring gauge questions

Where the inch, the ring and the point are defined

1. Inch: defined as exactly 25.4 mm, Wikipedia
2. Cigar: ring gauge is diameter in 64ths of an inch, Wikipedia
3. Point (typography): the PostScript point is 1/72 inch, Wikipedia