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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

A4 is so ubiquitous around me (Europe) that, no matter its merits or not, it's really a major PITA when you get documents that are not A4. They don't line up nicely with the A4 stuff. They don't go gently in the A4 folders / sleeves / pockets / ring binders (files) / etc.

Typical offenders in my case are medical bills printed on dot-matrix printers.

I don't even know if there's perforated continuous stationery/form paper with tractor holes that, once you strip the holes, is A4 sized? I guess it's really uncommon if it exists for I don't ever recall seeing any actually used.

Now don't get me wrong: hearing the song of a dot-matrix printer makes me happy (brings back lots of memories as my first printer was a dot-matrix one) and it's nice that that tech is still in use here and there. I just wish the dot-matrix printers in Europe would use A4 continuous paper (which may or may not even exist).

And don't get me started on oversized continuous paper that is not perforated: this is the kind of stuff that can trigger obsessive-compulsive disorder!

I guess all this rant to say that even in Europe, where A4 is ubiquitous, you still have places using other sizes than A3/A4/A5 etc.

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I am sure someone has already pointed this out, but there is indeed A4 sized tractor paper. Old person irrelevant anecdote, in the days before affordable high resolution inkjets laser printers, 9-pin dot matrix, 24-pin dot matrix and daisywheel/golfball printers ruled the world.

Submitting coursework in college was required to be on A4 paper, and if you used a dot matrix printer you lost marks too. Some of my college professors, even on my computer science undergrad were so stuck in their ways that they demanded you type everything up on a manual typewriter and would penalize you if they thought you had done it on a computer.

College students were lazy, so everybody would use the college's 9-pin dot matrix printer (losing points) and then mad dash for the single guillotine cutter in the adminstration's office like they were French royalty in 1789. I special ordered very expensive A4 tractor feed paper, and bought a second-hand daisy wheel printer that nobody wanted because daisy wheels didn't do graphics, and typed everything up on a computer. No lost points, no lining up to use the guillotine, no mad dash at the end.

But yeah, places using sizes other than A4, screw those guys.

That brings back the memories. I was one of the first students to submit a word processed paper at my college. "Just in case," I had bought a cheap and slow daisywheel printer. I cooked up this idea to prepare my pages with correction fluid before printing them, but never found it necessary.

I ended up asking one professor if it was OK to use word processing. He said, just this once. The next week, there was an all-faculty meeting (small college), and they actually discussed whether word processing should be allowed. The profs who were already using word processing spoke up in its defense -- from the physics department. They reassured everybody that the computer was not doing the writing. The college came out with a statement saying it was OK, but that we were on our honor to not use a spell checker.

By the time I graduated, every prof was using a word processor.

What I don't think the profs figured out, for several more years, was how to grade a paper that's mechanically perfect. All of my papers got A's, and I chose courses where the grade was based solely on written work. I think in terms of efficiency and aesthetics, using a word processor bumped my GPA by easily half a point by graduation. I was already a good typist thanks to programming.

Many years later, when my kids were in grade school, the writing assignments included formatting requirements, including margins in inches, for documents that would never be printed. These requirements came from the ironically named "Modern" Language Association. Today, teachers say, any format you want, just get it in by the deadline.

I would suspect the software was written for a non-A4 format, so if you were to put A4 paper in it you might get line wraps that would screw up multi-page prints.

Oh my, I just remembered the pain of setting the perforation skip when using nonstandard paper. And then realizing that those problems were a luxury compared to the problems big professional office printers throw up today.

That satisfying tearing of the perforated tractor feed edges. And the not so satisyfing tear when you tried to do too many at once because you were in a hurry.

Wide format tractor fed music paper in green.

I had tractor fed graph paper for a while. If you want to know frustration, try lining up your DnD game maps to that...

And I had forgotten about the perforation skip/misalignment. Thanks for bringing that back. Triggered.

IDEA: Someone please make a "white noise" generator that play audio of old computer 'whirring' noises... like a dot matrix printer, a fax machine, a modem, etc... that plays low-key in the background...

I actually miss the sound of a dot-matrix.

The excellent MyNoise.net website has a couple that may match:

"Vintage Office" [1] has a Dot Matrix printer.

"Calm Office" [2] has a Printer/Scanner.

[1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/vintageOfficeNoiseGenerato...

[2] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/openOfficeNoiseGenerator.p...

YO!!!!!

I am a sup[er fan, and subscriber to that site!!

I am happy that others know about it!

Not just white noise but whole songs

https://youtu.be/VXbP7OkQ8LQ

HOLY SHIT!!!

That was my first printer ~1986 or so.... gosh I wish I still had it.

Make it play the Windows 95 sound...

(the guy who wrote the win95 startup sound was paid $30K)

This is pretty amazing though:

https://youtu.be/pX4tBIwhOqY

Search for "old computer asmr" gave me this: https://youtu.be/tt3kYcHbbLg?t=160 (link right to the relevant part).

OMFG thank you!!!

16 v 33 bitch

> I don't even know if there's perforated continuous stationery/form paper with tractor holes that, once you strip the holes, is A4 sized?

There is. We had an ImageWriter in the 1980s which printed on exactly that. Until i read your comment, i assumed that was the standard!

This format still exists, for example:

https://www.paperstone.co.uk/paper/listing-paper-computer/5-...

That paper does make me irrationally angry for one reason:

"Sheet size is A4 - 11.66inch deep x 235mm wide (edge to edge including sprockets)"

(Edit: Although it does make a sort of sense, in that dot matrix line height is in inches - but still aggravating).

Technically it's 0.66 millimeter shorter than A4. A bigger problem is width, it does not fit the "standard" 80 columns.

I had this problem too, with majority of documents being A4, but a single bank/med bill ruins the rest of the stack.

My solution was to just give up on keeping the documents unless I have to, for legal/tax purposes, and just digitally archive them. Modern scanner apps are super good, and the OCR/search features make the 20 seconds it takes to scan it and throw away the paper.

I have box that papers I need to keep goes into.

The theory is that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever need to produce/find the papers every again.

So if I have to, I'll pay the cost of sorting and organizing the papers when that day comes.

Kind of like lazy evaluation in Haskell :)

Honest question: why do you archive things you don’t have to archive?

For easier searching and sometimes nostalgic reasons.

When I was in my early 20s, I used to save ticket stubs, boarding passes, train tickets, etc when I was traveling, I really liked keeping them. But when I saw myself becoming a borderline hoarder, I took photos of them and threw all of them away. Even today, I have the habit of taking a document image of ticket stubs and other new things, specially when I'm in a new city or a country.

There is no practical use for them, just that they help me to not stack up physical papers.

The other real documents I archive are mostly documents related to dividend notices, water/electricity bills that unfortunately come in snail mail, etc. I'd be fine if I don't keep them, but I have them in the very unlikely scenario that I just might need to make a paper trail.

I have a bunch of stuff I wish I could easily digitize and throw away the originals. But, aside from doing a few selective things, the effort to en masse digitize and add enough metadata so I could actually find stuff isn't worth the return.

For some people "please provide evidence of your previous travel history" is something to worry about. Will they accept digitalized version? Who knows!

I would have absolutely no systematic record of my travel history outside of stamps in a passport and TripIt.

Passports tend to get lost, and replacement won't have the stamps. Whether this matters for you mostly depends on your citizenship.

Certainly for some nationalities getting visas is harder than others. Though I'm not sure what would even constitute proof beyond passport immigration stamps and you don't necessarily always have those. Most boarding passes these days are either just printed out on a printer or displayed on an app. I'd actually have a pretty good record going back maybe 20 years with TripIt but that doesn't seem as if it would be considered authoritative.

My mother kept the first utility bill of the year for electricity, natural gas, water and sewer, etc. She lived in the same house for 42 years and liked to be able to see how much the amounts had changed over the years.

I’m not sure it was tremendously useful but she could verify her feeling that water and sewer increased disproportionately to the others, for example.

How does she remember to do that every year? That's amazing.

How do you know you don't need to archive it?

Recently a colleague needed to provide 20 years of details of addresses lived and trips overseas made in order to complete various immigration forms.

Governments can change their demands at their whim. If you don't have the documents, you're screwed.

I guess it happens but, while I've lived in the same house for many years, I wouldn't remotely have any real proof of overseas travel except for passport stamps and whatever is recorded in TripIt (which I assume wouldn't constitute proof). We're taking dozens and dozens of trips. I suspect very few people save that type of information unless they know in advance they'll need it.

If you never move, and certainly never travel between countries, then you are probably OK. But honestly, you don't know. Governments can and do change the laws when it suits them.

Here's another specific example. It's not just the initial tweet, you can see example after example in the discussion:

https://twitter.com/OmidVEbrahimi/status/1558024348132327424

You're not in the same position, I assume you were born in the USA. But do you really trust the Government not to change the laws? And what if you want to accept a contract or employment in another country?

How much would you need to have archived in those circumstances?

Are you sure?

Personally, having lived and worked in four countries, I archive pretty much everything.

Not the parent but: because you often don't know with certainty whether a particular document will be needed at some point in the future.

Edit:

Concrete example: I'll probably never get audited by the IRS, but if I ever do, I really really want to have all the records I need to defend myself.

For the IRS, you only need to keep documents seven years back. Anything older than seven years can be shredded.

So everybody must keep 7 years of archives? Is that why houses in the US are so big? And does everybody have an archival room? Or does the IRS accept scans? So many questions.

You can always "reconstruct the file" in order to replace lost physical documents, assuming there are digital copies elsewhere.

The IRS and the courts may lose files occasionally. Then there are fires, like the government records Missouri fire: https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973

It happens.

In theory, yes. In practice, I think most people probably don't.

I think scans would be acceptable, but you'd probably have to verify those claims with the bill sender.

Houses in the US being so big has less to do with storage requirements for tax filing documents than everyone wanting to stay above average for everything, including house size, and home builders and real estate agents profiting greatly from the general FOMO.

How many documents do you have??? Surely one smallish box would do for most people?

Some people, yes. Others, no.

As your finances get more complex, and you change employers more often, and you have more 401k plans that are distributed around various companies, and you have multiple credit cards, etc... then your storage requirements will necessarily increase.

Essentially all such records are available online. In any case, a file cabinet is almost certainly sufficient if you want to save a few years of printed copies.

You still need to provide your own copies of that information, which can be verified against other sources. If you can't provide that information, then you're likely to not do well during the audit.

So, you do want to make sure you've got your own copies of those files, whether hard copy or scanned.

But for 99.99% of US citizens, a single file cabinet is likely to be more than enough.

I tend to throw things in a drawer or other container and throw most of it out every few years. I figure that was, if I need something, I can probably find it. But I don't have to go to the work of filing the 99% of things I'll never need up-front.

That's what I do. All bills, statements, etc. go into a cardboard document box. I start a new box every calendar year. If I ever need to find anything, it's a bit of a search but not too bad as the papers will be in roughly chronological order.

I almost never need to find anything.

It's a decent compromise between separate files for everything (which would take too much effort) and not saving stuff at all. Even scanning stuff to save digitally is more work than this system.

After 3 years the box gets burned.

The exception is tax returns, they get saved separately.

3 years is a bit short. In the last year or so, I've twice needed to find old documents -- ~5 and ~7 years old, respectively.

I keep receipts for significant purchases (electronics etc) in one envelope per year. It's so little space I keep these indefinitely, so if I sell an 8 year old bicycle I should still have the receipt.

Everything else is in an A4 (now this comment is on-topic) file, and with so much being electronic these days it takes a decade or more to fill one up.

I do file some things away (e.g. stuff I know I'll need to do taxes) and certain other things (like insurance) go into a fireproof box. But, for the most part, I do much less organization of paper than I used to, especially of things that I can probably just find in an online account. I have file cabinets but I rarely open them these days. Most of the paper I systematically save is going into my travel destination boxes.

For me it's a "you never know" situation. The cost of being wrong about this can be very high.

I'm still waiting for the US to convert from letter size to A4. The change feels imminent, but for some reason it hasn't happened yet. Maybe we need to convert to the metric system first?

> The change feels imminent

Really? I see zero chance of it. A4, while mathematically nice, offers very little benefit and is an awkward (just a little too large) size to handle. Consistent ratios are of extremely dubious value; if I'm reducing a text by 50%, I'm going to retypeset it anyway. A5 is even more awkward than A4. Too big.

Too big for what? A5 is half the size of A4. But regardless, A5 and A3 both have their uses.

Too long to handle comfortably. I've never liked it. I do make sure to typeset two versions of things I do so Europeans can have something they're familiar with (and their tooling prefers), but I just prefer things a little shorter and a little fatter.

edit: about A5 specifically, I prefer 5½ x 8½, which tends to become 5¼ x 8¼ (even smaller) after trimming the bleeds.

Too long? A4 is shorter than letter by 18mm

Most printers sold are letter size by default. Most can accommodate A4 but the defaults need to be changed, you need to arrange new suppliers of office supplies (A4 is less prevalent in the US than Letter size) etc.

I‘d imagine that printer sales are declining in the digital era, which slows down a transition, and most of the ones remaining are at institutions with a lot of inertia (government, medicine)

"Most printers sold are letter size by default."

No, there are many more printers in the rest of the world than in the US and the vast majority are used with or are set to A4 paper.

A4 is the world standard, like it or not. It's only the US and a schizophrenic UK that converted to metric and still doesn't realize it that aren't metric.

The UK has used metric paper for decades, probably the 1970s.

Granted, I accept that. I should have been more succinct.

Let me give you an example (and it's very common, this is but only one instance). The BBC sells/syndicates programs of its health guru Dr Michael Mosley across the globe including here in Australia where I am at present. Regularly, these UK-based programs discuss obesity and weight.

Well, these days, the problem is that no one here knows what pounds are let alone stones and ounces except for a few like me who remember the pre-metric days before the 1970s.

Same goes with TV shows from the UK and the US that mention temperature in Fahrenheit degrees. If you asked the typical person here what 20°C was in Fahrenheit they wouldn't have a clue that it's 68°F.

...And if you were to ask them the difference between an Imperial gallon and a US one, you'd get blank stares to the effect 'what's a gallon and why are there two types?'. Then neither would the majority of those in the UK and US know the fact or that a US 55-gallon oil drum is essentially equivalent to a 44-gallon (Imperial) one. Right, the US has even screwed up the Imperial system.

Moreover, there's an arrogance from those two countries about this. For instance, Mosley's programs are supposedly made to promulgate health and here they're largely deprecated when the local audience cannot put a measure on what he's talking about.

That arrogance is palpable, the BBC doesn't even bother to subtitle the programs with the equivalent amounts in kg or Centigrade and such. And why doesn't Mosley make an effort to mention the matter in his programs? After all, he's been here enough times and even made medical programs here to be fully cognizant of the problem on this side of the planet.

I guess I should qualify that with, most printers sold in the US are letter size by default, and that would be true for pretty much any sort of office supply store in the US. Which means that it‘s also the easiest thing to source in the US.

My experience of every modern printer I've seen of Oriental manufacture and that I've used in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia are essentially identical when it comes to paper sizes. All cassettes are large enough to take American Quarto/Letter size and have adjustments/paper restraining guides that easily cover both sizes.

It's possible that there are printers being imported into the US that have nonadjustable cassettes but I've never seen any (not in recent decades anyway). Even decades ago the HP LaserJet II and III would take both sizes. BTW, I still have a a fully functional LJ III bought around 1994.

As far as I'm aware, there are no printer manufacturers that manufacture normal office type printers left in the US, everything now comes from Asia.

Edit: However, in the US reams of letter size are the norm whereas nowadays it's almost impossible to Letter size in any other country. It's been a problem for me because I've had to produce manuals in both paper sizes (depending on which country I was working in at the time). Same with the ring binders which are slightly different sizes not to mention that the US often only uses 3-ring binders whereas everywhere else they're 4-ring and the hole spacings are incompatible.

Which is why literally the second sentence of the comment you responded to is:

> Most can accommodate A4 but the defaults need to be changed, you need to arrange new suppliers of office supplies (A4 is less prevalent in the US than Letter size) etc.

Most Americans doing printing are doing so for Americans, and doing so in an American market that primarily supports Letter size. If you‘re doing localization for other markets, paper site is pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things compared to much larger hurdles like translation.

The location of manufacture ultimately has very little to do with what the consuming market is asking for. Just because most electronic goods are made in China doesn‘t mean we need to switch to Chinese style plugs and sockets.

Nevertheless, the real issue is about the failure of the US to adopt the metric system, and similarly the UK to a lesser extent (UK's already supposed to be metric but it acts as if it isn't). Read my reply to Symbiote.

As I said in a HN post only a few days ago, in most things Australia is a follower not a leader but it got it right with the introduction of the metric system. During which it banned the use of Imperial units (measurement). For example, one couldn't buy a 12-inch rule, only a 30 cm one.

After everyone had gotten used to the change the rules were relaxed and some Imperial stuff could be used but most measurements still had to remain metric - fuel in liters, food in kg etc.

One of the reasons the changeover worked well was that kids learned metric from the outset at achool and if adults didn't want to appear stupid in front of them they had to learn to adjust and they did. In the UK that never happened to the same extent.

Everywhere else four ring binders?

I think not.

The most common standard outside North America is two ring.

For a manual or other documentation supplied in a ring binder, the stronger 4 ring version would be much more common.

Why does it feel imminent?

Honestly it's a lot easier to have bespoke paper sizes now, because (a) it's not like we're actually using paper for much and (b) you can just set your computer to whatever.

I'm one of those fountain pen oddballs to whom paper is very important. A4 and A5 notebooks for me, please.

Same here. Off topic, or I'd discuss my fountain pen collection.

By which you mean “addiction” if my desk is anything to go by.

* Coughs in Urushi *

I once took the time to figure out how much ink I used per page. 1.1 mL of ink from the CON-70 in my Pilot Custom Urushi (FM) translated to 11 pages of writing on A4 paper (~ 350 words per page). Because A5 pages are half the size of A4, I now knew both how many pages of either size notebook it would take me to finish a bottle of ink: ~ 500 A4 or 1000 A5 pages to one bottle of Iroshizuku Shin-Kai.

That's going to take me while, but, due to the paper sizing properties, I have an easy translation of the information.

Eh, the half-size relationship is hardly an innovation of the A-series of paper: the US uses letter, tabloid/ledger (double-letter-size), and half and quarter letter size. US printed matter and blank books mostly end up in that same set of sizes, because they're all made by cutting and folding the starting stock in half, modulo some trimming of the edges to square them up after binding.

The innovation of the A-series line was using the golden ratio, so that the half-sized paper has the same aspect ratio; half-sized paper always had half the area.

That is among the plausible definitions of "half-sized paper". LOL. But the A-series innovation makes it easier to imagine scaling content/resources because you don't have to "retypeset" in your brain.

But, mostly, my fascination with A-series paper as an American is rooted in my utter disappointment that we refuse to use the metric system (even though every single American does without knowing it).

That was an excellent "drag the topic back to the topic" play. Well done.

And 90% of the time professional printers are going to be printing to huge sheets and cutting it down anyway.

"The change feels imminent,"

You have to be joking. The US is already the laughing stock of the world as it's demonstrated repeatedly that it's incapable of going metric. (If you go metric you automatically get A4.)

I recall Kennedy once said that the 'US chose to go to the moon and do other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard'.

Seems many took 'other things' to heart and decided that if things had to be done the hard way then they may as well continue slogging it out with the antiquated brain-muddling Imperial System.

Right, doing 'nothing' the hard way set the US back a decade or two.

Twice in the past century the US changed paper sizes.

During WWII, to save paper, the government mandated that letter size would be one inch shorter, so it was 7 1/2 x 10. This innovation did not survive the war.

Legal documents submitted to court had to be on legal size paper. In Florida, this was prohibited by the end of the 1980's. Land deeds followed thereafter.

Not sure when federal courts jumped to letter paper.

Letter paper is the default for LaTeX. Thank the gods for the KOMA classes.

The British and Commonwealth countries were hardly better with their foolscap and legal sizes, it was a big mess.

The A sizes, A4 etc., and the B sizes for posters and art are significant step forward because of their ISO standardization and widespread adoption

However, from my perspective, it's not perfect, especially so at the 'edges'. For example the width of A7 shirt-pocket size notebooks of the spiral-bound flip-over variety are just too narrow to use comfortably, here the standard breaks down.

Before ISO standardization notebooks of this type were often wider and easier to use, also they were commonly available.

> If you go metric you automatically get A4.

Canada is metric in almost everything it does, but it still uses Letter-size paper.

An excellent example of the spillover effect. I've noticed that whenever I've visit there.

Also to this outsider, that cultural and physical coupling to your southern neighbor is noticeably different in different parts of the country say between Quebec and British Columbia for instance.

The line height of a dot matrix printer is 1/6", so A4 continuous paper would be roughly 70 lines but not quite exactly 70. Breaks would be messed up after a few pages. It would also not fit 80 characters horizontally. That's why continuous paper is stuck with US letter or 14"x11" format.

Back in my day, I had a CTO that required I | the messages log to the line printer....

Each day I would have to review the log for any security breaches with a highlighter and investigate any attempts to break our system...

Yeah, that sucked. (we were one of the first VOIP people...) ((Quicknet))

>They don't line up nicely with the A4 stuff. They don't go gently in the A4 folders / sleeves / pockets / ring binders (files) / etc.

This statement, and the rest of the post, simply reads "I don't like different". However, the article is about the mathematical benefits of A4, the failures of 8.5x11, and the true benefit of A4 from a paper-size agnostic society.

This article convinced A4 is better (and the entire system) not because it doesn't fit in my folders, but because it makes practical sense.

It has practical implications. I have a file cabinet which is made for A4 paper in landscape. Now, I have some official paperwork from another country that has more the form of a spell scroll and the only way to fit that into my cabinet or binder or wherever is to fold it.

Which is something I would like to avoid on things like birth certificates and such.

I don't think anyone is defending documents that have to be rolled up?

Letter should fit fine into your file cabinet unless it has some really tight margins.

If "legal" size is a problem, then I can understand that better, but that size is just as much of a pain in a letter world as in an A4 world. They made it too long on purpose. They likely would have done the same thing with A4 as a base, if letter didn't exist.

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