International Standard Paper Sizes
cl.cam.ac.uk
cl.cam.ac.uk
There are two places where you can tell it's a bit dated though. The first is in declaring the TV aspect ratio as 4:3; it's just about universally 16:9 now. The second is the expectation that the U.S. would be converting to metric, that becomes less likely with every passing year.
A fun fact is that "letter" size is pretty much hated in Asian countries. Since many poorly-internationalized softwares choose "letter" as the default printing size, while its usage is virtually zero there.
It's not just east Asia that can be annoyed by American defaults, but the whole world.
It gets interesting when we start mixing imperial,metric and colonial measures.
Meanwhile, anyone can fold an A4 perfectly in half and it will always fit perfectly in a C5 envelope. Paper can't be folded? Mail it in a C4 envelope instead. Think a C5 is too big? Get a C6 envelope and fold it twice.
All the parts fit perfectly into each other, and it's obvious how they fit. Any size paper can be mailed in any size envelope simply by folding it.
Just use the envelope to measure where to fold.
Normally the C3 or C4 envelopes used by government would be printed on the inside with a mass of letters, but in a way that matched with how the letter paper inside would be folded.
But postal mail is almost a thing of the past. I think the last two “letters” I recieved was a new credit card and the keycard with one-time code for my government issued digital login.
The vast majority of envelopes are the long ones where you have to fold three times and you never get it right (but are hzppy if it still fits into the enveloppe)
Luckily, most countries in the world are not the US.
Can anyone confirm that this is really the case in the U.S.? In Canada at least, lawyers often use a paper size even longer than legal format. It makes photocopying a huge pain because the glass plate isn’t long enough on ordinary copiers, and these extra long sheets don’t fit in standard file cabinets without folding, and forget about using binders. Nobody uses these ridiculous extra long sheets except (Canadian) lawyers.
Growing up the in the US the only place I ever saw legal-size paper was legal pads.
https://www.michbar.org/file/generalinfo/plainenglish/pdfs/8...
> Can anyone confirm that this is really the case in the U.S.?
I kinda randomly look at scans of trial court documents sometimes, and I don't think I've seen one that looked like it was printed on legal paper (but I've hardly been systematic and my sample has been minuscule).
However, all the printers at my office are stocked with legal size paper, and I sometimes would use it for printing diagrams were I needed a little more space to get everything to fit or tables that were a little wide (but not so wide that I needed to use tabloid paper). My mortgage statements from my bank legal size, as are my property tax notices.
"letter, written in 1786-10-25 by the physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (University of Göttingen, Germany, 1742–1799) to Johann Beckmann, seems to be the oldest preserved written reference to the idea of using the square-root of two as an aspect ratio for paper formats"
Excerpt of the English Translation -
"I once gave an exercise to a young Englishman, whom I taught in algebra, to find a sheet of paper for which all formats forma patens, folio, 4to, 8, 16, are similar to each other. Having found that ratio, I wanted to apply it to an available sheet of ordinary writing paper with scissors, but found with pleasure, that it already had it. It is the paper on which I write this letter, but to which, because since by cutting some of its original form may have been lost, I also add an uncut original. The short side of the rectangle must relate to the large one like 1 : √2, or like the side of a square to its diagonal. This form has something pleasant and distinguished before the ordinary [form]. Are these rules given to the paper makers or has this form spread through tradition? Where does this form come from, which appears not to have emerged by accident? Honoured wellborn forgive me this freedom."
The article is obviously dated, but at this point that'd be such a waste of time and resources. Government has to be focused on digitization and paperless/electronic processes, ideally getting rid of photocopiers instead of upgrading them.
Had never heard the logic behind the ISO paper sizes before though, very cool!
The US (NIST) in collaboration with international bodies lead the redefinition of SI units based on fundamental constants [2]. Furthermore, semiconductor industry, university labs, medical industry, etc. all use ISO standards and the metric system. The US semiconductor industry alone is larger than the GDP of Switzerland. I studied engineering in America and we used the metric system throughout with some problems in ANSI units for familiarization of the units - ultimately, the engineer needs to adapt to the company's unit system and not try to be a thorn.
I personally am tired of the rest of the world patronizingly explaining the advantages of the metric system to Americans - over and over. It is not that difficult of a concept and most technical people, engineers I know in the US already understand the benefits of the metric system. It is mildly annoying at best and condescending at worst. If we are in the unit system mess, there are a lot of things that still do not follow base-10 based units. For example, font type units (points) from Switzerland. Or the way we measure time. How come there aren't 10/100th units of a minute/hour commonly used around the world? A second is split into 1000 milliseconds but a minute is not split into 1000 seconds. Why this inconsistency? Why 360 degrees? If we didn't have 10 fingers, the entire decimal system is worse than base 12 or duodecimal system [3].
The problems faced by America are exactly the same type of problems if we want to convert the entire world to duodecimal system. It is next to impossible despite of clear advantages. Note that I am not defending the people that arrogantly want to stick to status quo - there are certainly people like that in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...
- Mostly US paper sizes
- Pounds for human weight
- Ounces and pounds for weight,cheese and meat cuts in the supermarket.
- But metric for pre packaged products(they usually come in sizes similar to imperial though, like 450 grams)
- Gallons for gas and large sized bottled water
- But liters and millilitres for small bottles of water...
- And quarts for motor oil.
- Liters for duty free alcohol and spirits,but "bottles" for locally sold alcohol.
- US units for clothing and shoes
- But yards for fabrics/textiles
- Metric units for construction areas
- Colonial units for land areas and agricultute
Also, people always say that the US is the only country that uses feet, pounds, miles, etc. But there are a lot of other countries that still use those units, or at least understand them, even if it's not an official unit. I even work with engineers from China who use and understand Imperial units. I also visited a friend in Ireland who had a (pre-digital) scale that measured weight in stones.
- Light aircraft use nautical units.
- Ultralight use metric for speed and distance but feet for altitude and vertical speed
- Gliders use metric
- Charts use feet for altitude. Aviation authorities define airspace using nautical units but ground authorities use metric for things like fly over altitudes. All converted to feet in charts but the legal text use meters.
- AFAIK, mechanical parts for non-US built aircraft are metric. Pipe fittings have always been in inches for some reason, but commonly converted to metric (1/4in is written as 6.35mm).
I've only ever seen non-native speakers treat English as a lingua franca. Most native speakers I know view the ubiquity of English as fun trivia, and don't ascribe to the language the same type of importance that non-native speakers do. I remember once somebody posted open source code with non-English comments, and the people who were annoyed by that were almost exclusively non-native speakers.
Personally I see it as a form of gate-keeping. People who went out of their way to learn English as a second language want to continue using it for everything because then they have a leg up over their non-English speaking countrymen. The US on the other hand doesn't even have a de jure official language. Most government forms come in both English, Spanish, and whatever language happens to be common in the local area. A while ago I was getting census ads in three differently languages. In high school they told me I couldn't work at McDonald's unless I spoke Spanish.
It would be better for everyone if we just let go of the concept of "lingua franca" entirely.
That is like saying we should just give up on the idea of understanding each other.
The reality is that cultures that come into contact need a language to understand each other. When there are more than 2 cultures coming into contact, the possibility of everyone just learning everyone else's language decreases dramatically.
For example, I work in a Romanian company and I have to work closely with US colleagues, German colleagues, Indian colleagues, Chinese colleagues, and Italian colleagues. In school, I learned English and French. If we didn't have a lingua franca that everyone is expected to know, I would have had to learn 4-5 more languages when I joined this company. I don't even know if my Chinese colleagues speak Mandarin or something else, or if they at least speak the same dialect. And of course, everyone of them would have also had to learn 4-5 new languages as well.
So unless you believe human beings can each easily learn ~20-30 languages (to pick some arbitrary low number), or unless you believe we should stop communicating across language boundaries, or hire translators, then we can't really let go of a lingua franca.
> I remember once somebody posted open source code with non-English comments, and the people who were annoyed by that were almost exclusively non-native speakers.
As a fun anecdote of my own, we recently implemented a clock feature in our app. During the demo, our US colleagues were confused why the clock feature was showing "16:23" instead of a normal hour.
Plus, you know, since it's a Romanian company you could all just learn Romanian in addition to the 2-3 languages you already know. Instead of only interacting with other cosmopolitans IT monkeys you could go interact with the locals and/or upper management for once. The local Romanian teenagers could get programming internships without having to learn English too. If fry-cooks can learn Spanish you can learn Romanian.
Who knows how many potential Linus Torvalds are out there working menial jobs in rural Finland because they failed English in high school.
[0] https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/multilingualism
And while in work conditions some amount of multilingualism could be required, there are other venues like trade conferences where trying to handle people speaking tens or hundreds of languages would quickly become untenable for all but the greatest polyglot.
And Linus Torvalds is a great example. In a world without a lingua franca for IT, how could a Finnish student learn from and debate an American professor? Papers could be translated, but how would interactive discussion happen? Would Tannenbaum have learned Finnish or payed a Finnish translator if Torvalds hadn't known English?
PS. No reasonable people think Americans are dumb for either the reasons you stated, or any others; that would be dumb in itself. However, strawmans like that make for an excellent "us-vs-them" political agenda narrative.
Because metric time failed to catch on. The French Republic used metric time for several years, but Napoleon went back to customary time.
In metric time, there are 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. That means that one metric second is 0.864 seconds.
The calendar still has 12 months, but each month is exactly 30 days, with three 10-day weeks. There are five or six holidays at the end of the year, depending on whether it's a leap year.
The months have names based on the seasons. That's why events in French revolutionary history referred to by dates such as "the 18th of Brumaire" and "the 9th of Thermidor."
What annoys me is that the US gets singled out when the difference is one of degree, not kind. The UK still uses pints for beers, most countries still use their equivalent to feet in carpentry.
In what real life situation would you want to divide 1 foot by 3 and get an integer as the result? If you're cutting materials, you usually want a given length, not 1/3 of whatever you happen to already have. So you're doing addition and subtraction, not division.
Also, it only works when you're simultaneously converting from feet to inches, and only when it's 1 foot! It's no use dividing 1 inch by 3, or 10 feet by 3 or almost any other length really. Though you could do a little maths to get 2 feet / 3 = 8 inches. But 4 feet / 3 isn't called 16 inches, it's 1 foot 4 inches which is pretty complicated to work out compared to ordinary decimal maths.
4 feet divided by 3
= 4 * 4 inches
= 16 inches (It's perfectly reasonable to stop here, your tape measure isn't going only say 1'4")
= 16/12 feet + 16%12 inches
= 1'4"
vs.
4 meters divided by 3
= 4/3meters + ...
= 1meter + 4%3/0.3 decimeters
= 1.3meter + 4%0.3/0.03 centimeters
= 1.33meters ...
For each level of precision in metric you have to remember one additional digit, where as in the degenerate case for imperial you remember a constant number of digits at each step. Think of it as making multiples of the {1,1,2}th primes more convenient vs making the {1,3}th primes more convenient.
But I still doubt this has any practical use. Can you give me a concrete example where you or anybody you know has done this? How common is it?
Can we agree that equally spacing 4 of something is a common operation? The metric example would be, 2 meters, divided by 3 = 0.333x2m = 0.666m But look at your tape measure and see which measurement is marked more promimently, an arbitrary centimeter precision measurement or an integer number of inches.
30cm divides as well as 12in, and things that aren't nice numbers are easier to handle in cm or mm. Mark out every 4⅝ inches until you have a yard, then mark out every 12mm.
Contrived examples are easy.
You know what also doesn't make sense? The SI Prefix system, where you have redundancies like "A thousand megawatts" instead of just saying "A billion watts". Most languages already have built in prefix systems. In fact, South and East Asian languages space theirs every 10^4 instead of 10^3, making SI prefixes a clusterfuck to use. That's in addition to the fact that the prefixes themselves are chosen haphazardly. The ordering of Micro, Nano, and Pico has no discernible pattern as most people simply know all three words to mean small. Abbreviations such as M, m, and μ, are easily mixed up.
Contrast that to thou and mil, which are easily remembered as abbreviations of thousandth and millionth. It's also easily extendable to an arbitrary precision.
We cool internet people™ are, of course, using Swatch Internet Time.
> - The height divided by the width of all formats is the square root of two (1.4142).
> - Format A0 has an area of one square meter.
When we look on A0 papers on the market mostly it's size is 841 mm × 1189 mm, that is not correspond to this standard:
- Length Ratio: 1189/841 = 1.41379310345 (should be 1.4142)
- Area: 0.999949 m² (should be 1.0 m²)
P.S. There are few websites which are useful for retrieving various paper formats sizes.[0,1]
And it is! I mean, if you're not going to use an electron microscope to measure it :)
The real measurements should be 840.9mm x 1189.2mm, but I'll forgive them for the rounding.
> the rounding is always down, so that is is possible to get two A(n+1) sheet by cutting one An sheet.
Another way to see it. What dimensions should it have for you to deem it correct?
The "rules" was five simple points, you can't just ignore the ones that doesn't suit your argumentation.