Hacker News Reader

Comment by w4rh4wk5 | Hacker News Reader

While I really appreciate the fact that you can split an A4 sheet and get two A5 sheets. Even as a European, I always felt like the American letter format feels 'nicer'. I feel like the letter format's ratio works better for taking notes in a notebook or browsing through printed pages -- less tall, but wider than A4.

Anyone made a similar experience?

View on HN

I agree. The American reluctance to metric units is strange and I appreciate the mathematical elegance of ISO paper sizes, but letter paper just feels more pleasant on the eyes than A4.

> American reluctance to metric units

Reluctance is too strong a word. In the US we use metric for quite a lot of measurements. Frequently things are labeled in both metric and imperial. What we have is ambivalence. Folks from countries with more metric adoption care way, way more about the US using imperial than anyone in the US does.

I dunno about ambivalent. Tell a US person it's 30° outside in the summer and at best they'll give you a blank stare, at worst they'll say "well no it's gotta be warmer than that out." They don't learn it, so no one uses it. If schools taught it then it might catch on. The food labeling stuff is for regulatory reasons, the only metric units US people actually use are liters for beverages.

I do think A4 is too wide for note taking, I almost always use two columns.

so A5?

Not necessarily, if they’re talking about splitting it vertically, not horizontally.

Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com