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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).

Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:

The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram

[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]

ISO 216 A series papers formats

AO

A1

A3

A5

A7

A6

Et.

A4

Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.

Source: Financial Times

  • thedarkfly@feddit.nl
    22·
    6 months ago

    Are you american? If so, the “unwieldy and too long” is probably because you’re not used to it. I’m not used to letter-size and it seems weirdly short and unnecessarily wide but I know it’s because I’m just not used to it.

    • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I’m German. If the pages are a comfortable size, why does no publisher ever use A5 or A4 paper? To quote an answer I gave to another comment here:

      Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm [Edit: 21cm × 15cm] (A5).

      Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

      Another hint that the paper format is weird is that scientific papers on A4 are always either printed in two columns or use the ninths rule for margins, i.e. 1/9 of margin on the inner and upper edges and 2/9 of margin on the outer and bottom edges, essentially throwing away almost half of the page (I’ll admit there are more economic recommendations of 1/11 or 1/13). This is to make the columns narrower to get closer to the target of 60–80 characters per line. Note also that this makes the ‘usable’ area approximately 20cm long, which is much closer to the American’s ‘Legal’ format (216mm).

      • thedarkfly@feddit.nl
        2·
        6 months ago

        These are very valid arguments that can’t be reduced to a lack of habit. Thanks for sharing your perspective!

      • Yamayo@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm (A5).

        Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

        A5 is not 15x10,5

        If A4 is 291x210 then OBVIOUSLY the next one starts with 210: 210x148.

        • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          You’re right. Sorry for getting my post-7pm arithmetic skills on you. However, my point still stands. ‘Close’ is not ‘conforming’ to the standard.

          • Yamayo@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 months ago

            Close to your non standard book measurements. I really appreciate the usefulness of ISO 216, witch is actually a standard.