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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

  • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    To be fair, A4 yields unwieldy pages that are too long to comfortably read. And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?

    • ValiantDust@feddit.de
      27·
      6 months ago

      I do this all the time. I print two pages on one A4 sheet (or rather four, two on each side) and then fold them so they are like a leaflet.

      That’s the main advantage of the system – you don’t have to design things differently depending on how big you want to print them. You can scale the same design to an A6 flyer or an A2 Poster.

    • Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it
      24·
      6 months ago

      And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?

      When you want to read it more comfortably for example.

    • 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.

    • Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de
      10·
      6 months ago

      almost all consumer printers are for a4.
      i had (rare) occasions where i wanted to print a picture for an a3 sized frame and was able to glue together two a4 prints.

      also, as far as im aware, books in a4 size actually consist of a3 sheets bound together in the middle. (same with other sized books)

      • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        almost all consumer printers are for a4.

        I never said A4 wasn’t the standard. I said it’s not a good one.

        books in a4 size actually consist of a3 sheets bound together in the middle. (same with other sized books)

        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.

    • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
      9·
      6 months ago

      Where I’m from, it’s super common to print A4 in half size and fold them into a little booklet when you need to distribute a few pages to loads of people