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Comment by noSyncCloud | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone care about "almost whole imperial values"?

Less the "imperial" part and more the "almost whole"---it would work just as well if the pages were say 20cm by 30cm---but it is very convenient when doing layout (both electronic and physical) that both the content and the margin are "nice round numbers", and the natural divisions are also nice round numbers that you can easily measure with a standard ruler. 1/2" margins all round? Then the area is 7½ by 10. Printing a 2-up booklet? Each page is 5½ by 8½, exactly. If I had to design the size from scratch to optimise this property I'd probably go with 8"×12" (or 20cm×30cm!) but I assume there's some older printshop standard we're inheriting from here.

Not saying A4's not good. Just acknowledging that "nice round numbers" are convenient sometimes. Standards that use US-traditional measurements seem to do better at that for some reason.

This doesn't work at all, let alone just as well.

Half a 20x30 sheet is 15x20, so the ratio has changed from 2:3 to 3:4.

1:sqrt(2) is used to maintain the ratio. The round number is at the start, with the area of A0 being 1m².

> Half a 20x30 sheet is 15x20, so the ratio has changed from 2:3 to 3:4.

So what? The only thing I ever try to print multiple to a sheet is slides, and those are a different shape entirely.

Yes, I get how the A-series paper sizes work, and that they prioritise having all sizes be the same aspect ratio. That has literally nothing to do with what I'm talking about in my post. It turns out that paper "works" for things other than resizing other sheets of paper.

Yeah I’m struggling to understand the value of that too.

The US still uses imperial measurements.

Actually, no. The US gallon (3.785L) is not the same as the imperial gallon (4.546L), a point which made me see red when Canadian opponents to metrication argued that we must keep the gallon because the US is our biggest trading partner.

The real reason Canadians and Brits should have opposed metrification: the transition wasn't ever 100% completed leading to horrifying Frankensystems where Brits buy meat by the kilo but measure their own weight in stone. Or Canadians still measuring train rail distances in miles.

Then just push for full adoption of the system and over time youll get there. Can be slow and sometimes painful but so are a lot of things; "no pain no gain" as they say

You have it backwards. Metrication in Canada stopped halfway because the opponents created such a stink that the government of the time decided to back off, and nobody since has had the courage to seize the nettle. Perhaps in a generation today's schoolkids, educated in metric, will try again.

To rephrase te question: why would somebody be annoyed with the fractional metric size of A-n sizes ?

The answer is probably quite subjective. In my case, when I deal with materials such as wood, cardboard or paper I enjoy immensely to have dimensions that snap to a certain grid. Call it a mental defect if you will. To illustrate further, let me propose a strawman: would you have no preference between the A4 size being: (1) 210.32 x 297.912 or (2) 210x297? Does it not bug you that 210.25 was rounded down to 210?

The US does not use imperial units. Imperial units are those defined in the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824. What the US uses is the US customary system, where units have the same name as the Imperial ones, but not the same values. Now, the US customary units are defined in terms of SI units anyway, just with annoying, non-integer conversion factors.

EVEN BETTER

(where "better" is actually "really annoying")

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