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Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

The paper size and foreign stamps make sense, but I must say the inability to use a pen surprised me a little more.

I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating.

The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...

> one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address

I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.

Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.

>you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly.

It only has to be lined up well enough to be read by a human, they don't reject them just because it's sloppy or not lined up correctly.

Yes, I know. It still offends my aesthetic sensibilities. ~

In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.

I wouldn't say it's that different from how the Royal Mail currently recommend one write the address:

https://help.royalmail.com/personal/s/article/How-to-address...

My father writes the address staggered; that is, each subsequent line being indented a centimetre or so relative to the previous line. Were you taught to stagger the address at your school in the 90s?

Yes, I was taught to do it staggered, but I think this was dying out at the time and I believe that by the time I wrote any letters of my own I didn't do the staggering. My theory is it's because of the prevalence of printed labels. I haven't seen it for a long time now.

Now that I'm reminiscing a bit, it was also fairly common at the time for people to order a batch of sender labels that they could affix to the envelope. My grandparents had particularly distinctive golden metallic labels which meant you could instantly tell who it was from (if you didn't already recognise the handwriting).

We have envelopes like that, too, but they're not all that common.

Do they still say Министерство связи СССР ?

They did for a few years after USSR was gone, as they were still going through old supplies.

AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.

Being unaware of paper sizes is baffling to me - where I live, letter and legal paper are common but I’m entirely aware of ISO216 paper sizes.

One time at my old job I was trying to load the printer, and I said something like "Oh shoot, these are oversized sheets; I need the 8.5x11."

My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"

"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"

"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"

I did not know how to respond to this question.

Whenever someone questions what you know, the correct answer is “why don’t you?” - I will not be trivia-shamed!

Ha, I'm trying to remember where I learned that as well. I know we covered it in drafting where we learned an 8.5x11 A paper is half a sheet of 11x17 B paper which is half a sheet of 17x22 C paper, and so on. But I thought I knew the size of A paper long before that, and that it was common knowledge, though I can't think of where or why I would have needed to know. Then again I also know that legal paper is 8.5x14 even though I have never had to use it.

Grade school for me - teachers would say "8.5x11" instead of "letter size" or even just "printer paper." I don't know why they did it, and I assume it's for the same reason that I say it too. It's probably what their teachers said to them!

Because that’s the size of the paper.

In a country using ISO paper, national paper sizes of one of the few places not using this standard are obscure.

I've never seen it in any office or stationary shop in Europe. It's available online, at a premium.

They're not just uncommon, they're not used at all. You will only see US legal in the UK if an American company/person sends it to you, how often do you think that happens? I've had it maybe once or twice, but you could easily never see it, especially people born ~this century growing up with less paper of any size anyway.

Odd take. It seems perfectly natural that the country using different sizes from everybody else would be aware of that fact, but that a country using the same size as 95% of the world might not know about the weirdo sizes used by those 5%.

Fair but if you’re going to diss, at least be aware it’s not just one country :) (I’ve never lived in the country you’re thinking of, and all the countries I’ve lived in use non-ISO216 paper sizes).

I live in Italy and I've never seen a normal "office" paper sheet which is not A4.

The problem is that the rest of the world is not aware of US sizes.

Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.

I never realized that “LETTER” in that error referred to paper size—no printer I’ve had has actually given that error, so I only ever heard about it through oblique references to Office Space and such. It makes so much more sense now…

The 'PC' part is paper cassette, it's the printer literally telling you to load letter sized paper into the paper cassette, but everyone acts like it's some mysterious message that's impossible to figure out.

Well, PC also means Personal Computer, and letter also means element of alphabet, so it's not like there isn't room for confusion

Sounds impossible if you didn't read the manual. Who reads manuals?

On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

>On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.

I was joking :)

Could be PC LOAD LEGAL if your document is really weird.

It's one thing to know that the US, Canada and the Philippines don't use the same paper sizes as the other 190 countries in the world; it's quite another to be given a physical example for the first time in your life.

You missed at least one other country that uses “US” paper sizes.

Thanks for such an enlightening comment in which you were too lazy to write a 13th word naming the country you were thinking of.

For anyone else curious as I was: Mexico is the 4th country, and I don't believe there are any others (but I could be wrong).

There are more Letter countries than just those four. Nicely covered with the “I could be wrong” though.

Last time I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you at least thought your comment was worth posting, now I assume you're just a troll and am blocking so I won't see your comments again.

What’s more trollish than telling someone “I’m blocking you because you’re a troll”? If you’re going to block me just block me, don’t owe any explanations to me.

You’re so funny heheh

It's exceedingly rare to encounter US paper sizes in the UK and I expect the rest of Europe too. I've only received these from two places: the FSF and Donald Knuth.

True, any page oriented software like LibreOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, will show you US Letter sizes and US Letter Envelope sizes and you may have messed up with printing on wrong size... but as other posters say, maybe this days nobody prints on real paper anymore...

They all default to ISO sizes for me.

If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.

It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.

It's still problematic the other way around - you try to print that PDF on A4, but it's formatted for US Letter.

In most cases it still doesn't matter, either because software defaults to scaling to fit, or else because the margins are large enough that it works out even if printed in true size. But sometimes stars align and then you learn about those weird paper sizes.

I wrote a letter to a friend last year. It was the first time in probably well over a decade I had used a pen for more than just scribbled notes or doodling. I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

> I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.

Yeah that's crazy. I use pens to doodle designs or write little recipes or Kanban cards or index cards for what's inside a box... The author maybe does all that by typewriter?

Or they do it all digital, or don't even do it at all. Label printers and note-apps are very popular with IT-people.

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