Here’s a question for those of you heading back to school this week, particularly those focused on mathematics: Where do you get custom-made graph paper?

Thanks to a Westminster, Md. company called Black Cat Software, you can use your Mac to do it with its Graph Paper Maker (shareware, $19.99). Black Cat has produced quite a few shareware products for the Mac since its founding in 1991 such as Audiocorder, a nicely executed sound recording program.

I can barely remember using graph paper when I was in school, but as an English major I treated math the way Mac aficionados treat Windows – I dealt with it only if necessary. Doing a quick search on Google revealed numerous sources of free PDF graph paper files, but among those PDF files are many permutations. If you need something tailored to a specific situation, you could be in for a lot of hunting.

That’s the purpose of Graph Paper Maker: it provides complete control over the creation of a grid. Options include not just power over line spacing but also the thickness and color of the lines; the size and font of the labels; linear or log scales; and even the paper size. Should you want to generate something quickly with less fuss, there’s an “Easy Graph Wizard” that winnows your options to a less-daunting 8 data fields.

When you’ve finished adjusting all those settings, a click on the “generate” button creates and saves a PDF file of your graph paper. To print copies, you’ll need only open the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader or Apple’s own Preview app included on all Macs. Once you have the PDF file, you can open that customized graph paper any time you want to print more copies – you don’t need to re-create it in Graph Paper Maker.

In addition to square grids, Graph Paper Maker has a menu that offers a few more exotic variations, including Isometric Graph Paper, Axonometric Graph Paper, Trapezoid Graph Paper and Hexagon Graph Paper. Don’t ask me what people use it for, although the Hexagon Paper brought back fond memories of board-based Avalon Hill* war games.

Someone must need this stuff; Graph Paper Maker debuted just over a year ago in July 2006. And Black Cat has covered just about every possible customer. Not only is the Mac OS X version Universal Binary, the latest release – 1.6.1, released Aug. 16 – also can be had for Mac OS 9. How many companies are releasing software for OS 9 these days? Oh, and there’s a Windows version, too.

*Local trivia note: Avalon Hill, now part of Hasbro, started out as a Baltimore-based game company in 1958 with it headquarters on Harford Road.