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Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

Small rant. Are display manufacturers (especially eINK/ePaper ones) alergic to a size that matches a standard A4?

Dasung make an A4-sized e-reader. They also make e-ink monitors, 25.3 and 13.3 inches in size.

https://shop.dasung.com/

No, they don't make an A4-sized e-reader, they just falsely claim to (as does Fujitsu with apparently the same display). Per their specs, the 13.3 inch screen is 202mm×270mm.

The e-reader itself is slightly larger than A4, at 224mm×302.6mm. Since the front case of the device is white, zooming in slightly would give a reading experience similar to holding an A4-sized piece of paper, when reading documents with white margins.

Wow, I had no idea there was an eink monitor as big as 25.3" available!

If it was <$500 I'd probably impulse buy it immediately, I wonder how long it will take for prices (either of this screen or future alternatives) to drop from its current $1,800 price...

I would say that there are at least two good reasons. A4 is not a relevant standard in the biggest market (USA) and A4 proportions are objectively not great for reading (too elongated).

Seeing that this product is not targeted at the US and might never even make it there, I'm not sure that's relevant. A4 documents will either be cut off or squished into a smaller space to fit all, so the proportions of the screen are also not really relevant when that's the proportions of the document.

> A4 proportions are objectively not great for reading (too elongated).

This statement is purely subjective. It is false in general and there's nothing objective about it. I've read thousands of pages of A4 with no problems, and in fact I'd say it's great.

Almost no books are published in A4 format, even in Europe. I think that has a reason.

No one mentioned books, but standard paperback book sizes are actually even more elongated than A4 (but smaller). A4 is used a lot in academia for papers, theses, lecture notes, etc., and that's mainly what I've read in that size.

It's not about the aspect ratio, but the total line length measured in characters. If you pay attention you will realize that most published papers either have two columns or large margins, like the standard LaTeX article layout.

Do you really think I've read thousands of pages without paying attention? There is a lot of material in a single column without overly-wide margins.

This subthread is about aspect ratio. dfadsadsf claimed "A4 proportions are objectively not great for reading (too elongated)".

> A4 proportions are objectively not great for reading (too elongated).

I spent the first 30 years of my life in the UK and US letter paper always looked too squat when I encountered it at work. I've spent the past 11 years living in the US. I recently dug out some old papers on A4 and they looked weirdly elongated. It's surprising how strong the perceived weirdness of paper dimensions could be and and how easily it was changed. Seems like it's totally subjective and we could probably be comfortable reading in many proportions.

My favorite proportion, enforced by various bits of TeX documentation set up to be printed on either side of the pond, is 210mm wide (A4 width), but 11" high (letter-sized height).

It's a workable compromise which ensures that all versions of a document have the same pagination/index.

I'm curious if there's a reason, or just accidental quirk of your comment, that you gave one dimension in mm and the other in inches?

Because that’s what the standards are specified as?

Ah thanks, hadn't stopped and thought about "letter-sized" being an American standard.

I still think it's odd to not translate one or the other if describing a 2D size, though.

I wasn't using my Mac where I have a Service which will do dimension calculations/unit conversions on the fly.

Type:

    11*25.4

select it and choose Safari | Services | Calculate and Replace (or hit command #)

    279.4

You could also store paper with those proportions in American file cabinets without folding.

And they can be stored in A4-sized cabinets w/o difficulty as well.

I don't work with paper much, so the squares I stare into most are either wide or narrow and high.

To me A4 looks weirdly fat/short/square-ish on first look.

On a longer look I think it looks very nice (especially so knowing why the ratio was chosen).

In general though, I prefer narrower columns for reading (closer to A5), so I don't know why it should be even wider/shorter.

> especially so knowing why the ratio was chosen

My understanding was that the advantages of A4 are more practical than aesthetic. Is that not true?

> My understanding was that the advantages of A4 are more practical than aesthetic

The oft-cited reason is that you can fold A4 in half, etc. to form other standardized paper sizes.

Which sounds nice, but in practice just doesn't come up all that often.

For you, and even then for you directly.

Papermakers definitely benefit from this standard, which indirectly benefits you.

And from personal experience, being able to turn any stack of A4 papers into an A5 'zine is great.

It is a very common occurrence, since you can print/photocopy two pages side-by-side on one sheet without any loss.

Photocopiers and printers outside America include buttons for this.

> It is a very common occurrence, since you can print/photocopy two pages side-by-side on one sheet without any loss. > > Photocopiers and printers outside America include buttons for this.

It's a standard feature of photocopiers in the US too.

It can't work perfectly except with the A series paper sizes.

They could settle for the max width and height of both to have a single product for all markets.

A stack of A4 to which I could load even static content wirelessly would really be something.

Is this a wireless printer?

Better: a wireless printer that doesn't complain that you're out of cyan.

Brother laser printers.

I'm at least a thousand pages into the starter cartridge that came with it. I got a notification that it was low on toner a year ago, dismissed it once, and that same toner is still chugging along

Onyx Boox Tab X?

The screen of that seems to be about 203mm×270mm (13.3 inch diagonal, 1650×2200 pixels). Smaller and with a different aspect ratio (3:4 instead of 1:√2).

Interestingly, several major reviews on page 1 of Google call it "A4-sized", but only one review actually called it "near A4-sized". Standard of writing these days is horrendous for such a key spec.

Fujitsu seem to use the same non-A4 display for some of their e-paper devices, and they call it A4 in the product name: https://fujitsuquaderno.com/products/fujitsu-quaderno-a4-2nd...

Which standard A4?

(Which might be the problem.)

210 x 297 mm.

This thread nerd-sniped me into looking up the exact definition of the dimensions. Neither standard gives the formula used to obtain the specified sizes (for A4, precisely as above, ±2 mm). But what's interesting is that we can tell from the rounded values that it is _not_ the geometric sequence that the stated principles imply,

  x(n) = 1000 * 2^(-1/4 - n/2)
  y(n) = 1000 * 2^( 1/4 - n/2)

y(0) = x(-1) = 1189,2 would map to the 1189 mm long side of A0 and short side of 2A0 in the standard; y(1) = x(0) = 840,9 to 841 mm; and y(2) = x(1) = 594,6 to 594 mm -- inconsistent with any common rounding scheme. This also rules out evaluation of the recursive form with intermediate rounding, and/or starting with the approximations 1,414; 0,841; and 1,189 as written in the standard.

Instead, a form that _is_ consistent is:

  x(0) =  841 = round(1000 / sqrt(sqrt(2)))
  y(0) = 1189 = round(1000 * sqrt(sqrt(2)))
  x(n) = floor(y(n-1) / 2)
  y(n) = x(n-1)

Which makes sense - once A0 has been calculated, only halving and doubling are needed to determine the other sizes.

B0 is even easier to memorize: 1000 mm x 1414 mm

That’s exactly how itvwas calculated. A0 is defined to have the right proportions, rounded to 1mm. The smaller formatsround always down, because this way it‘s possible to make two A(n*1) sheets by cutting an An sheet in two halves and possibly cutting away a thin stripe from the long side.

Show me a paper standard other than ISO 216, aka the international standard for paper size, that uses "A4" as the indicator for its default letter size.

DIN 476 does use the same indicators. Of course that's just the original German standard that ISO 216 was based on and defines the exact same sizes, so it really doesn't matter. (Also it is superseded by DIN EN ISO 216, which is just ISO 216 backported.)

Making sure we are technically correct is appreciated, thank you.

But yes, that's a bit of a "structural vs nominal typing" distinction, and we seem to agree that a "structural typing" interpretation makes most sense here.

The ISO 216 A4. What other A4 standard is there?

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