THE COMPASS ROSE

the sixteen compass points with exact bearings: four cardinal, four intercardinal, eight in between

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Formats: A4 · A3 · A2
What you get: Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject: science · everyone · reference · study

Definitions of the point (1/32 of a circle, 11.25°), cardinal and intercardinal directions and the compass rose follow Bowditch, The American Practical Navigator (NGA Pub. 9), Glossary of Marine Navigation; the sixteen abbreviations follow NOAA NCDC, Climatic Wind Data for the United States (1998). Bearings are arithmetic: 360° ÷ 16 = 22.5°.

THE FULL COMPASS HOLDS THIRTY-TWO

A mariner’s compass divides not into 16 but into 32 points of 11.25° each — Bowditch splits every point into quarter points again. Reciting all of them in order is called boxing the compass.

This sheet shows every second point of the thirty-two: the sixteen that NOAA still uses to record wind direction.

On the sheet

Definitions of the point (1/32 of a circle, 11.25°), cardinal and intercardinal directions and the compass rose follow Bowditch, The American Practical Navigator (NGA Pub. 9), Glossary of Marine Navigation; the sixteen abbreviations follow NOAA NCDC, Climatic Wind Data for the United States (1998). Bearings are arithmetic: 360° ÷ 16 = 22.5°.
Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 9 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

THE COMPASS ROSE

THE FULL COMPASS HOLDS THIRTY-TWO

On the sheet

Printing

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