PrintableCharts
THE LARGEST COUNTRIES

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THE LARGEST COUNTRIES

the ten largest by surface area — as squares at true scale, each inside the next

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.

Standard$1.50

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

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
units · everyone · comparison · classroom

The side of each square is the square root of the country’s area, so the square on the sheet has the same area as the country. All figures come from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 2023, table 3, surface area column for 2023.

THE LEAD OF RUSSIA OVER CANADA WOULD ITSELF BE THE SEVENTH COUNTRY ON EARTH

The difference between first and second place is 7,113,576 square kilometres: more than any country in the world outside the top six. On the drawing it stands as an empty square and settles into the stack between Australia and India.

The steps in the row are uneven too. From first to sixth the area falls gently; between sixth and seventh it more than halves. A large country means two different things, and the border is not where the ordinal number puts it.

At the bottom the list ends by a hair: tenth place exceeds eleventh by 1.5 per cent. This is where the ranking depends most on whose figures are used.

On the sheet

  • The side of each square is the square root of the country’s area, so the square on the sheet has the same area as the country. All figures come from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook 2023, table 3, surface area column for 2023.
  • 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.

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