A4 vs US Letter | Hacker News Reader

A4 vs US Letter

betweenborders.com

69 pointsparenthesis59 comments

It's too bad that the US didn't switch to the metric system and A4 paper. It isn't so much about imperial vs. metric (though the metric system's design feels more natural); but it would be nice to have a worldwide standard format.

precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures

Especially when it comes to science. Drove me nuts when I first moved here

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. As a US-trained scientist, I never used anything but the metric system except when standing inside a machine shop.

Scientists are among the US citizens most likely to relate to the metric system. Although I have to confess that my personal temperature meter is still calibrated in degrees Fahrenheit. ("Uh, it's 25 degrees in Rome today. Is that really hot? I can't remember.") For some reason temperature is my brain's last holdout: I'm pretty well used to meters and liters and even kilos. Perhaps that's because a liter is like a quart, a meter is like a yard (and a kilometer is close to a half mile) and a kilo is about two pounds, but Fahrenheit is completely nuts because there's an offset as well as a ratio in the conversion.

I googled without luck, but I remember reading a study awhile ago that demonstrated that Imperial is easier for a human to estimate. Of the the experiments was asking for people familiar in each to guess the length of some objects. The people who gave an answer in feet and inches were more accurate than people using centimeters.

They postulated that it was because the values in the Imperial system "evolved", and are they way they are because of their convenience for measuring objects in a human scale. Eg, when eyeballing something hand-sized, its easier to pick out a few inches than it is dozens of centimeters.

I'll post a link to that article if I can find it.

Imperial units also tend towards being more division oriented, for instance a foot divides cleanly into halves, thirds or quarters.

A gallon divides into 4 quarts which divide into two pints, which divide into two cups.

That same series would be (starting from 4 liters), 4l, 1l, 0.5l, 125 ml, 62.5 ml.

In your volume example, imperial units only divide cleanly for certain factors (e.g. 2 in your example), from certain starting points (e.g. two pints) and within certain ranges (keep dividing a cup by 2 and it stops dividing cleanly).

Yep. But it stops at ... one ounce. So a gallon can be divided cleanly by two seven times. It's naturally no coincidence that a gallon is 2^7 ounces. :-)

I'm in favor of the US switching to metric (I'm American, but have lived in Europe for the last 7 years), but just trying to give some context on what I believe are some of the niceties of the Imperial system.

A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".

A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".

This opinion can only come from exposure. Whenever I see "one cup" in a recipe I'm 100% baffled. A big cup? A tea cup? One of those larger coffee mugs? Trying to judge what is actually meant here can leads to volumes differing about two to three times in scale.

Give me centiliters, desiliters and liters any day.

I still have no idea what a cup is. And 50-70 ml seems way too little to make sense, so I will just assume you pulled those numbers out of thin air.

1 cup = ~250 mL = ~1/4 Liter = 237 mL

Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'. If you use the same cup for all ingredients, the proportions of the ingredients stay the same, which is the most important part of a recipe.

It does not matter if you use a big cup, a tea cup or a coffee mug. The meal will still taste good, as the proportions are kept.

While for a 'metrical' recipe you need something that can measure weight and volume, for a 'cup' recipe you just need a cup, no matter what kind of cup.

I realize this is totally derailing the original topic, but I'd just thought I'd correct one incorrect assumption you've made:

Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'.

Not even remotely true. Especially with "cups" of water and "tablespoons" of chilli the results can be rather interesting ;)

Fast ballpark conversion that's easy to do in your head that works for most outdoor temperatures -- F -> C: subtract 30, divide by 2

Oh, that's really useful. I had my own mental approximation, but it was much mushier than this, and this is pretty darn accurate.

Much easier than multiplying by 5/9ths. Or 9/5ths. Whatver.

Seems like imperial is used http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

You know that if you started off with metric, metric would feel intuitive too right? (Aza Raskin has a video where he basically says that what most people call intuitive they really mean "familiar".)

Right. I grew up with the metric system. (Just like anyone else outside Britain or their old colonies.) To me gallons and feet are not intuitive. But a meter and a liter and a kg is familiar, so I can roughly tell how much that is without a measuring instrument.

The fact that a foot is supposed to be the length as a foot doesn't seem like any useful advantage to me. My foot is not precisely 30.48 cm anyway.

Some imperial units are still in use outside of the British world. Inches for TVs and computer monitors and car wheels. Feet is used for boat lengths although meters is also used sometimes. Knots and nautical miles in sailing. Feet is also used in aviation.

Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Just like http really. We should all be rolling our own protocols.

>Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code.

It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day.

Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors.

In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.

You've convinced me. I say we renew a push for the decimal time unit as well. Apparently we're just waiting our time with degrees and such. The cleaned up, decimalised version (gon?) is available.

Tell us how much a cubic mile of water weighs in ounces. Then get back to us re: the "arbitrary" Metric system.

What's the temperature/pressure of the water?

This is exactly the issue. Making it easier to solve some problems that are very rare in the day to day lives of most of the world is not a good reason to force people to switch measurement systems.

Converting between differently sized units of measurement is an everyday problem if anything is. I enjoy being able to do so by shifting a decimal point.

What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters!

If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.

Most definitely. Even in the UK, where they switched to metric some time ago, imperial measurements can still be seen all over, and many papers still provide both Celsius and Fahrenheit measurements.

While it would be nice if we Americans were exposed more to SI (rather than just in science classes), I don't really think it's important that imperial measurements be abandoned. They still serve their purpose in everyday life, so there's no real reason to switch.

"and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures"

Read that again, and tell me how it makes any sense whatsoever.

  Obsolete: 1. no longer in general use;

Simple, No one but the USA (and Malaysia or somewhere) uses them. So, the USA uses them, and they're not in general use.

Pretty odd logic you have there.

Why not just go the whole hog and say Metric is obsolete. After all, the chances of aliens in other universes using it is small, so we're likely the only ones using Metric.

edit: The UK is also pretty non-metric.

I guess that is how most Americans see the world, the rest of us are aliens.

Officially, the US kind of, sort of, has converted to metric- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

Moreover, I understand A-series paper — especially A4 — is slowly becoming the norm in US colleges and universities, if for no other reason than making it easier for students and staff to photocopy articles from (inevitably A4-sized) journals.

Has anyone actually seen this? I can't say that I've ever seen people at any of the US universities I've been to using A4, with the exception of some Europeans preparing some paperwork to send to the EU.

A4 paper doesn't fit well into typical folders and binders sold in America, and I didn't see A4 paper at all until I went to another country for a while. US universities tend to just have the printer set to scale pages to fit the paper by default. You end up with wider margins when printing A4 journal articles to Letter paper, but those can be handy for notes.

I realize this is, at best, tangentially related to this topic, but a few weeks ago I thought about formatting and printing my resume on A4 for a job fair. My thought was that if I wanted it to stick out from the rest of them, why not have it literally stick out? I decided against it, but I do wonder what sort of impression that would give an employer; as a US employer, how would you react to a resume from someone, also in the US, but printed on A4?

I think my reaction would be the same as if I got a resume from someone printed on 8.5 x 11 paper -- I'd ask the candidate to send me an electronic copy via email. :)

Seriously, though, I've been the hiring manager for a number of positions at various jobs over the past ten years, and the main way of collecting resumes has always been electronic. This is for jobs in both the technical and editorial fields. On the rare occasion that someone mailed me a hard copy of his or her resume, I'd almost always question the person's technical literacy. Worse yet for the candidate, the resume was likely not to get looked at as closely as the others nor re-reviewed because it wasn't in the same email folder.

That's not to say there's no use for hard copies of resumes. During the interviews themselves, of course, it's helpful to be able to look at a piece of paper. But I would usually print out the resume ahead of time and take it with me when I met with a candidate. After that, if I didn't make any important notes on the resume itself, it'd go in the recycling bin.

I guess I should have said that I was at a job fair. I realize that I could have emailed my resume to the company before or after the fair, but I wanted to leave the recruiter with something tangible to both indicate my interest in their company and to display my relevant skills.

However, your comment has prompted me to send an additional, electronic version of my resume to all the companies I gave hard copies to. It can't hurt, and it might give it additional visibility.

don’t send or distribute documents that depend on external factors to display and print properly. So, no Word documents, no Quark XPress documents, no PageMaker files, no AppleWorks files and so on.

Isn't quite right. Sure, that'll be a problem if you're distributing your document for print, but otherwise of that list it's only Word that insists on reformatting the display for the currently selected printer. The other apps will honour the page setup the document was created with, and only give problems at print time.

It's surprising that .doc became the standard for resumes when the display for the recipient can vary so extravagantly from the display for the creator. Oh wait, it's not surprising; it's depressing.

You can still get A4 sized paper here in the states, although not at OfficeMax (I don't think). Most paper stores would have it though. The trouble is all of our file cabinets, folders, and whatnot are designed for letter size.

It's nice to see the rationales, such as they are, behind each of these, but in the end we are left with a religious argument. There are good points to each, and they have been mentioned over and over and over again.

Very little will change, and arguing the merits of each system is pretty pointless. Better is to be aware of the advantages, the disadvantages, the conversions and the differences.

It's only units. Be aware, and work with them. There's no point in arguing.

I almost got into Hollywood by getting paper, tags, washers, from LA, and printing/binding my script, and sending it from the UK to the screenwriting agent in Los Angeles. They only read properly bound US Letter scripts (with the right WEIGHT of paper). However, I fudged up by saying I had an updated version, he said send a PDF, and he probably binned the old one and forgot about the PDF.

"PC Load Letter"

If you watch the movie with French subtitles, it says "CP Charge A4".

I'm in the UK and I deliberately buy US Letter paper and print on that. It's a nicer shape.

    Can anyone explain the relationship between 4:3 and 16:9?  I know 16:9 is each number in 4:3 squared, but is there a geometric reason/interpretation for this choice?

Do us a favor and delete any leading spaces in your comment. The two or more space you have is causing...

  the word wrap to mess up.

Please have a heart!

The squared relationship is actually pure coincidence. The dude who proposed the next popular ratio took all of the common presentation ratios (like 4:3 for TV, 1.85:1 for film, etc.) and laid them all on top of each other. The overlapping sweet spot was just about 16:9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Why_16:9.3...

"The file-format [PDF] is only semi-open and Acrobat files are larger than I’d like them to be, when compared to the amount of information encoded within them. There’s also the small point of cost."

I would like to point out that this was written in 2002 when it was still valid. PDF is now an ISO approved standard (ISO 32000) and therefore quite open. Also, making PDF files at least for viewing is a breeze. If you use latex (and why wouldn't you?), pdflatex works great and can even handle edge cases like PDF forms using hyperref. If not, PDF printers are still a dime a dozen (quite a few are actually free) which can produce PDFs without any hassle.

In conclusion: PDF owns all.

That's right but it's a pity that PDFs by default don't even include their unicode text content nor the correct sequence of words. They're good for document fidelity viewing and printing but horrible for further processing and even for interactive tasks like copy and paste. We urgently need a PDF successor.

What do you mean by 'unicode text contents'? Of course, text in PDF could not be pasted, but it's not a format intended for "editing', we have plain text for this. PDF was created to distribute text documents, drawings, and so on in a way that it will look exactly the same everywhere. But unlike postscript, it includes some high-level features like word indexes, protection and so on, so you can search inside PDFs, add notes, place interactive elements - things impossible in other formats at all.

Thus I don't really understand where the problem with format itself is? If you have suggestions regarding features needed, take a part in ISO comittee.

I didn't mean pasting into the PDF but copying parts of a PDF in order to paste them elsewhere. This is not deterministically possible because (most) PDF documents do not contain a sequence of letters or words but rather a sequence of painting instructions, which can be different from the order in which the document is read.

Also, the codes used to represent letters refer to fonts not to unicode code points (or other character sets for that matter). So my problem is that extracting text from PDF has to use a heuristic approach that always fails at some point. That's why copy and paste out of PDF documents leads to such strange results sometimes.

The use case I'm talking about is to distribute documents for viewing, printing AND further processing.

The issues I have with the PDF format are not solvable by adding features because the features are already there. PDF documents can contain unicode text and a very large number of other structural information as you have pointed out. I know because I have written PDF software and I have read the spec very carefully top to bottom.

There are two major problems:

* The PDF format is incredibly bloated, difficult to process, and it allows documents to be distributed without deterministically extractable text. (And I don't mean the case where the author deliberately restricts text extraction)

* The widely used tools to create PDF files, by default, do not use the PDF features that would allow deterministic text extraction.

The PDF format is older than the web. Data integration and search were not important tasks when PDF was created in 1992. It was meant for printing and viewing only.

The only way to solve these problems would be to remove features from the PDF spec or to mandate the use of other features. Both would be incompatible with previous versions in a way that is completely unacceptable. That's why I think there has to be a new much simpler format that leaves all the old arcane baggage behind and facilitates reliable processing in addition to viewing and printing.

I have a question that maybe you can answer, having really perused the PDF spec. Is it true that PDF removed the turing-completeness of PostScript?

I had heard something that the main reason for creating PDF was that you couldn't render a single PS page without rendering all the ones preceding it.

Yes that's true. There are no loops or gotos and functions have no side effects. PostScript has all of that. But I think it would have been sufficient to remove the possibility of global side effects to support out of order rendering of pages. A purely functional language without global state could've done the trick.

So I suspect there were other reasons as well for removing so many features. Maybe the complexity of interpreters. I don't know.

Oh man, don't get me started! I wrote some PDF processing software last year -- it was supposed to extract pinout diagrams from integrated circuit datasheets -- and to extract the text was a ridiculous task. Since characters can be specified in any order, what I had to do was look at their positions on the rendered page and then clump those into words with some overly complicated graph algorithms. Working with PDF should not be this hard.

If I were making a PDF successor, this would be one of the top problems to fix. At least make text selection work properly! And simplify the format a little, would you please? To get any sort of compatibility with my PDF processing program I had to write it as a custom rendering backend for the Poppler PDF engine. It should not be this hard.

If its US, its BAD!

If its European, its GOOD!

If it has been decided by some unaccountable academic pin head committee to be forced down the throat of others, its GOOD!

If its been around for the better part of a 1000 years and used by common folk in their daily lives, its BAD!

Hmmm.... I see a pattern here. If its used by people who think they have a RIGHT to be free from being FORCED by others to do what they would not otherwise do, its BAD. If its the consequence of arbitrary Governmental decree and enforced at the point of a gun, its GOOD.

In my opinion, there is no amount of rationalization that will make this good.

I don't recall any judgement call like this in the article. The Good/Bad dichotomy is something you are inventing in your own mind.

He sees a pattern _here_, not in the article. He's talking about the people _here_:

"It's too bad that the US didn't..."

"...its[sic] pretty asinine, ... and USA is stuck using obsolete..."

This has nothing to do with the metric system: You could define a hypothetical Z0 paper size as 42.81" x 30.27", a square yard, and then define paper sizes Z1, Z2, and so forth. Each would be half the area of the previous by performing the same operation. It's not as if 210 or 297 are particularly easy numbers to deal with, or that having precisely a square meter of material is all that important. Is it important that a sheet of A4 paper is about one eighth of a square meter?

And in defense of US Letter, its proportions are closer to the golden ratio than A4, which looks too skinny for me. But they're both too wide for letter writing; I think either octavo-sized or A5 paper is a more natural width for printing or hand-writing a single column of text. Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style – to mention one of a potential dozen or so authorities – recommends text columns be a maximum of about two alphabets of lowercase characters.

I like A4 better than US Letter. Perhaps because it is "different".

Back when I liked A4 more than US Letter, it was pretty much because I had a deep need to appear sophisticated by making conscious decisions to adopt exotic, European things. See also self-hating Americans who are against GMO and anything the US or any US company does because some Europeans are against it for political or economic – not aesthetic or scientific or otherwise relevant – reasons.

On another note, the original article writer spends a lot of time on paper sizing issues when resizing a PDF to fit on a different paper size is easy.

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