Hexagonal Graph Paper Generator
Hex grid for chemistry, maps and board games.
Lighter lines use less ink and are easier to draw over. Under about 0.15 mm some inkjets drop the line entirely, so check one page before printing a stack.
How the Hexagonal Graph Paper Generator works
Two very different groups keep hex paper on hand. Organic chemistry students draw benzene rings on it because a hexagon freehand never quite closes, and tabletop players map dungeons and overland travel on it because hexes give six equal neighbours where squares give four plus two awkward diagonals.
Also known as: printable hex paper · hex grid paper · organic chemistry hexagon paper · hex map paper for RPGs
Why hexagons rather than squares
A hexagon has six neighbours and every one of them shares a full edge at the same distance. A square has four proper neighbours and four diagonal ones that touch only at a corner and sit about forty percent further away. That asymmetry is a permanent nuisance in anything involving movement or adjacency, which is why wargames abandoned squares decades ago and why cellular models often use hex lattices.
In chemistry the reason is different and simpler: the molecules genuinely are hexagonal. Benzene, and by extension most of aromatic chemistry, is a six-membered ring, and drawing rings freehand that close properly and share edges correctly is harder than it looks under exam pressure. Hex paper does the geometry so you can concentrate on the substituents.
Both groups end up wanting the same product for opposite reasons, which is unusual and slightly charming. The chemist wants the hexagon itself; the map maker wants the space inside it.
Sizing for chemistry
Around five millimetres per side is the working size for drawing organic structures. That gives a ring roughly ten millimetres across, enough to write substituents at the vertices without them colliding, and small enough that a reaction scheme with four or five structures fits across a page.
Push to seven or eight millimetres when a structure carries long side chains or when you are drawing something to be photographed and shared. Drop to three or four when you are drawing a polycyclic system, a steroid skeleton or a large aromatic, and need the whole thing on one sheet.
One thing hex paper cannot do is show you double bonds, and the temptation to leave them out because the grid looks finished is real. Benzene drawn as a plain hexagon means something different from benzene drawn with alternating double bonds or with a circle. Get into the habit of adding them even on practice sheets, because an exam script that omits them loses marks.
Sizing for maps and games
Hex map scale is entirely a function of what one hex represents. Classic overland travel maps use six miles per hex, which comes from a day's march in older rulesets, and at that scale a region needs a lot of hexes, so 5 to 6 mm per side keeps a kingdom on one sheet. Dungeon and tactical maps at five or ten feet per hex want much larger hexes, 10 to 12 mm, because you are drawing furniture, doors and creature positions inside them.
The middle ground, a settlement or local area map, usually sits around 8 mm. That is large enough to mark terrain with a symbol and small enough that a village and its surroundings fit comfortably.
Print weight matters more for maps than for chemistry, because a map gets drawn on, erased, redrawn and photocopied. Keep the ruling light enough that pencil and ink read clearly over it, but not so light that a photocopy loses it entirely. Around 0.25 to 0.3 mm in a mid grey survives a copier and stays out of the way.
Pointy-top, flat-top, and why it matters
This generator draws pointy-top hexagons, meaning each cell has a vertex at the top and rows interlock side to side. That is the orientation chemistry uses for ring structures, and the one most published hex maps assume. Flat-top hexagons, rotated thirty degrees, appear in some board games and in a lot of software.
The distinction is not cosmetic if you are transcribing something. A map drawn on flat-top paper does not transfer cell for cell onto pointy-top paper; the neighbour relationships are the same but the rows and columns run differently, so coordinates do not carry across. Check which one your source uses before you start copying.
For original work it makes no practical difference and you should use whichever you find easier to read. Most people find pointy-top slightly easier to scan along horizontally, which is probably why it became the default.
Beyond the two obvious uses
Quilting uses hexagons heavily, in the English paper piecing tradition where fabric is basted over hexagonal paper templates and the pieces whip-stitched together. A printed sheet at the right size is a template sheet, and being able to set the size exactly is the difference between matching an existing project and starting over.
Beadwork, particularly peyote and brick stitch, charts naturally onto an offset grid that a hex sheet approximates well. Tile and paving layout planning uses it for the obvious reason. So does honeycomb-pattern crochet.
There is also a small mathematical use: hexagonal lattices come up in packing problems, in Conway-style cellular automata variants, and in graph theory exercises where the six-neighbour structure is the point. For those, a printed sheet is still faster to scribble on than any software, which remains true of most of what is on this page.
Frequently asked questions
What size hexagons should I use for chemistry?
Around 5 mm per side is the sweet spot for drawing structures with substituents you can still label. Larger than 8 mm and a modest molecule needs two pages; smaller than 4 mm and there is nowhere to write the atoms.
What size for hex maps?
Depends entirely on scale. A dungeon at ten feet per hex wants large hexes you can draw furniture in, around 10 to 12 mm. An overland map at six miles per hex packs in far more, so 5 to 6 mm gives you a usable region on one sheet.
Are these pointy-top or flat-top hexagons?
Pointy-top, meaning a vertex sits at the top of each hexagon and rows interlock horizontally. That is the orientation chemistry uses for ring structures and the one most hex map conventions assume.
Can I number the hexes?
Not automatically. Hex map numbering schemes vary enough between systems that any single choice would be wrong for most people, so the grid comes blank and you can pencil in whatever your ruleset uses.
Will thin lines survive photocopying?
Below about 0.2 mm, often not. Photocopiers and scanners have a threshold and faint grey lines fall under it. If the sheet is going to be duplicated, push the weight up to 0.3 mm and use a darker grey.