IPv6 ADDRESS NOTATION

eight groups of sixteen bits, the double colon, and one canonical spelling out of thousands

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: code · reference · study

The upper line is the full form: eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. The digits set in grey are the leading zeros, which need not be written. The lower line is the canonical form: no leading zeros, lowercase letters, and "::" in place of the longest run of zero groups.

ONE ADDRESS, 6,400 SPELLINGS

The address 2001:db8::8:800:200c:417a can be written as 6,400 different strings, and every one of them is legal under RFC 4291: the leading zeros of a group may be written or not, the letters may be upper or lower case in any mixture, and "::" may swallow any run of zeros — or none.

Trying all 6,400 of them leaves exactly one that satisfies RFC 5952 — 2001:db8::8:800:200c:417a. That single string is what the standard was written for: addresses identical to a machine did not match as text in logs, filters and access lists.

On the sheet

The upper line is the full form: eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. The digits set in grey are the leading zeros, which need not be written. The lower line is the canonical form: no leading zeros, lowercase letters, and "::" in place of the longest run of zero groups.
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 7 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.

IPv6 ADDRESS NOTATION

ONE ADDRESS, 6,400 SPELLINGS

On the sheet

Printing

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