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Comment by mrottenkolber | Hacker News Reader

I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a shitty format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems.

There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually...

A5 booklet printed: http://mr.gy/blogopy/max/3589981109.html

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> There is no way to get a proper layout done

This is puzzling - how do you explain the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with this whatsoever?

Finally: I have seen lots and lots of A4 books, but they're simply not as common. It probably does help to live in Europe in that regard.

Are you a bookmaker? The are the ones with the problems. ;)

> I have seen lots and lots of A4 books

And they all have suboptimal layouts.

> And they all have suboptimal layouts.

(my emphasis)

My question would be - would you be willing to ascribe that to taste?

No. Try to layout a document on A4 while maintaining at least basic standard rules (e.g. lines of 8-12 words, a pretty text body layout, e.g. a "nice ratio" like 3/4 or 1/2, with standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom). Since your font size will either be 11 or 12 pt on A4 because otherwise you use less than half of the paper or your font is really huge, you're not left with many options.

All of this is voodoo that you learned working with your preferred aspect ratio and size. None of these rules have any kind of objective basis.

I wouldn't be so hasty to dismiss hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of aesthetic tweaking by experts as voodoo simply to defend a page size and proportion whose primary advantage is not aesthetic but function.

None of that makes much sense to me, to be honest.

I find it curious that you just say:

> standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom

No units, which makes me assume you're talking inches... Perhaps your problem is that you also need to switch to metric? ;-)

No units because its all about proportions. E.g. the bottom margin is "double" so it can accommodate page numbers and set the text body on the "horizon".

I suspect the explanation is similar to the explanation of the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with US paper standards whatsoever, namely, that it's just paper, and most people don't have particularly strict usage constraints, so they just use what they have and it works fine.

This is what the B series is for. It maintains the geometric properties of the A series but has a 1.420 contrast ratio. B5 is what you want for a typical book.

It's also the geometric mean between A4 and A5, which is pretty cool!

Although I don't agree with the width statement, I just wanted to note that I personally find the B sizes nicer than the A sizes for non-fiction books. I find A5 pages a tad small for textbooks, but B5 seems just right. (So, effectively "B4 folded", which is usually printed on A3 to begin with, then folded into signatures, bound, and then ultimately cropped.) And since it's all the same proportion, it makes it easy.

Books come in absolutely random factors.

The book "advanced engineering mathematics (8th edition on my desk)" is just as wide as A4, but less tall for some reason.

I regularly print documents in A4, and full-width text is absolutely ok if you consider the required margins for binding.

As someone who printed every high-school and university essay on A4 paper, I can say it's a fine size for documents. You're right that it's a rubbish size for books, but that's a different question.

The point is: An A5 booklet on A4 is the same as A4 booklet on A3, etc.

No its not. In fact its completely unrelated because when making book you should care for aspects like font size and text body layout which follow an ergonomic perspective.

E.g. the same booklet layout on a3 wouldn't work at all because the font would be huge. Keep the font size small and you have really long lines...

I regularly print out A4 documents two-to-a-page side-by-side on my office printer. It saves paper, its easier to carry around, and it works just fine. No distortion.

If your docs are US Letter, how well do they print out scaled down two-to-a-page side-by-side?

I do this a lot for printing out (research) articles, and the answer is that the text gets shrunk much more, and the margins increased to account for the difference. (This actually turns out to be useful in practice, since there's much more whitespace to take notes in.)

You are misunderstanding him. He's not saying that you can't shrink A4 down to A3. He's saying that aesthetically you can't do this without (of course) changing the font size. But if you want to retain readability, you may need to keep the font size larger, thus requiring a complete reformatting of the text. That is, you're talking about math and he's talking about the realities in dealing with humans as readers.

Makes it easy for the "large print" edition for people with eyesight issues.

Y'know, you can just make the margins wider.

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