Print a clear, large-print medication chart — free, private, and easy to read.
Somebody you love takes six medications. The pharmacy labels are tiny, the routine lives in your head, and every "did Mom take her evening pills?" phone call is a small spike of dread. What actually works, and what nurses have taped to refrigerator doors for decades, is a simple paper chart: every medication, every time of day, a checkbox for each day of the week.
The internet's existing "free printable medication chart" tools are ad farms, PDF lead-magnets, or apps that upload a list of your family's medical conditions to someone's server. That felt fixable.
Type in the medications — name, dose, what the pill looks like, when it's taken. Paper Pillbox lays out a weekly chart organized the way pill routines actually work: morning, noon, evening, bedtime, plus an only as needed section. Print it, stick it on the fridge, check the boxes.
- Large print by design. Set in Atkinson Hyperlegible, the typeface the Braille Institute designed for low-vision readers, with a three-step print size up to extra large.
- Pill pictures. Each medication gets a little drawing of its real color and shape — so "the small pink round one" is findable at a glance.
- Time-of-day color bands. Morning is dawn-amber, noon is sky-blue, evening is dusk-violet, bedtime is night-indigo — and every band also carries an icon and a label, so the chart still works from a grayscale laser printer. On a chart long enough to need a second page, the band reprints at the top, because a page that doesn't say Morning is a page you can't safely act on.
- Portrait or landscape. Portrait by default — it fits a binder and a fridge door — and the columns re-proportion themselves if you switch.
- What you see is what prints. The live preview is the printed page. No surprises at the printer.
- Safety details on the sheet. Allergies, doctor and pharmacy phone numbers, print date, and a "follow your pharmacist's directions" reminder.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no server, no account, no analytics, no cookies — the page is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and your chart is saved in your own browser's local storage. You can save a backup file to your computer and open it again later, on any machine.
This isn't a privacy policy, it's a privacy architecture: the site has no
backend to leak from. And it isn't only a promise — paperpillbox.com is served
with Content-Security-Policy: connect-src 'none', so the page cannot open
a network connection to anywhere, not even back to the server it came from.
Open devtools and check.
There is no analytics script and no Google anything. The web server keeps ordinary access logs, with visitor IP addresses truncated before they're written to disk — enough to count visits, not enough to identify a household. The reasoning is written up in deploy/analytics.md.
It's a static page. Clone the repo and open public/index.html in a browser —
that's the whole deployment story. To host it, serve the public/ directory
from any static web server.
git clone https://github.com/sethatwood/paper-pillbox.git
open paper-pillbox/public/index.html
Everything the browser is allowed to see lives in public/. Nothing else —
not .git, not the deploy notes — is inside the web root, so no server rule
has to remember to hide them.
No build step, no dependencies, nothing to update. It should work, untouched, for a very long time.
To host it yourself, see deploy/ — it's a file copy plus a handful of response headers.
The audience for this tool skews older and includes people with low vision,
so accessibility is the product, not a checklist: semantic HTML, WCAG-minded
contrast, full keyboard operability, visible focus, generous touch targets,
prefers-reduced-motion support, and a screen-reader-sensible document
structure. If something doesn't work with your assistive tech, that's a bug —
please open an issue.
This repository documents a real deployment rather than a generic one, so a few
files name paperpillbox.com on purpose. If you fork it, these are all of them:
| File | What to change |
|---|---|
public/index.html |
<link rel="canonical">, the og: and twitter: tags, and the GitHub link in the footer |
public/app.js |
the .credit line in renderSheet() — it prints the domain on the chart itself |
public/robots.txt |
the Sitemap: URL |
public/sitemap.xml |
the <loc> URL |
deploy/stats.sh |
the SITE variable at the top |
deploy/nginx.conf |
the access-log filename, and your own Forge site id |
Two strings in app.js mention the name but are not yours to rename:
STORAGE_KEY identifies saved charts in a visitor's browser, and the app: "paperpillbox" field tags backup files. Change either and you lock people out
of the chart they already made, or out of a backup they already saved.
Nothing else is environment-specific: no API keys, no build config, no
.env. If you serve the public/ directory from any static host, the tool
works. Do carry the headers from deploy/nginx.conf across, though — without
connect-src 'none' the privacy claim in your footer is just a sentence.
Bug reports and small, focused pull requests are very welcome. The bar for new features is deliberately high: this tool's value is that it does one thing clearly and will never grow a login page. If you're unsure, open an issue first.
Paper Pillbox is a memory aid, not medical advice or a medical device. Always follow the directions from your doctor or pharmacist.
MIT. The Atkinson Hyperlegible font is © Braille Institute of America, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.