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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
fun fact: the length to width ratio of ISO 216, √2:1, is the same ratio as the tritone in an equal tempered 12-tone musical scale. If you fold A4 paper in half, you get a piece of paper with the same length to width ratio as before; analogously, if you invert a tritone, you get another tritone.
As famously read from letter-sized sheets:
I know it should be a fun fact but I can’t quite grasp it.
The US also doesn’t officially use the metric system sigh.
Yes, yes we DO use the metric system officially. In the early 1970’s the metric system was made the official standard for weights and measures.
What we didn’t do was force everyone to use it at 3:11AM 11/21/1974. It was decided to take a longer approach and let the change happen naturally and it has happened.
Everything in the grocery store is marked with metric weights and volumes. We buy butter by the gram, soda pop by the liter and whisk(e)y buy the milliliter. And everyone is looking for that same missing 10mm socket/wrench. (Where does do those things go anyway?)
How much more metric do we really need to adopt?
Well, milk is still sold by the gallon, butter is still divided into tablespoons, nutrition facts are still defaulted to cups and ounces. Wood is still sold by the foot or yard, cars still measure speed in miles per gallon, people still know their height and weight in feet and inches and pounds.
Could be worse but could be a lot better, too.
Wait, the US genuinely doesn’t use A4 etc.?
Letter paper (8.5" x 11" | 215.9mm x 279.4mm) is kinda sorta pretty close to A4 (8.27" x 11.69" | 210mm x 297mm) so without having the two next to each other, it can seem like A4 is just a funny piece of letter, and vice versa. But to answer the actual question, USA and Canada (and apparently the phillipines???) use the “North American Standard” which is a terrifying mess in comparison to the beauty that is the ISO standard.
Edit: typos
We have trouble fitting all our freedom on your kooky, internationally-recognized sizes
Here’s a comparison using the most sensible units possible:
Also, I’m pretty sure A4 runs through an American printer just fine.
Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that’s dumb, we should switch.
I’m British and you are not alone, worse still, I spent a year in the USA and never even noticed.
Do Euro printers say PC LOAD A4?
I think they probably do.
I want to only briefly defend the NA system in terms of naming. I get it, I worked in printing for decades, I know how shitty it all can be. But Letter and Tabloid communicate well for something that is otherwise all the fault of press guys.
Well, it’s 2024, so they mostly say things like “out of A4 paper - load A4 paper in tray number 3”. But yeah, they used to.
Let’s not even start with the metric system (used everywhere) and the imperial system (used in the usa and some african countries).
The best part is the US Military and NASA both use metric. I love that fact.
Except for the UI.
During the Apollo program they had very limited computer capacity in the capsule and lander. Computers were huge machines back then and they had to fit one in a spaceship.
The Apollo computers used metric internally for all calculations. Anything shown to the astronauts however was in imperial, as metric was apparently too complicated for astronauts to comprehend. They had to waste precious computer capacity converting to imperial because even astronauts can’t handle anything else.
The annoying “letter” paper size is for some unknown reason what windows always sets as the paper size unless I change it to A4 manually. Naturally if I forget the printer won’t print. US paper sizing - annoying me on the other side of the Atlantic.
File I’m printing: A4 PDF
Default printer setting in Windows: A4
Default setting on printer itself: A4
Setting that gets chosen automatically in the print dialog: Letter
Aside from the 1 to √2 ratio, the area of A0 paper is exactly 1m². People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting.
From their website: “We’re ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. We develop and publish International Standards.”
Sadly, ISO in recent decade started to do bullshit. They don’t pay for standard development, they don’t employ anyone for standard development, they collect membership fees from national standards organizations, require payment to download most standards and don’t allow to copy published standards. Also they retroactively paywalled a lot of standards.
People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting
how to make a good standard:
step 1: copy from DIN
Well, Germans are pretty anal about standards (thankfully) and they do them right, so why not copy them?
so why not copy them?
oh, I totally agree with you.
In fact standards are made to be copied. That’s like the entire point of them.
Not-super-fun fact: an 8.5 x 11 inch paper can be useful if you lack a ruler in an American office & you need to measure an inch or a foot.
If you fold the paper like in an image I’ll try to attach, the hypotenuse is 12.01 inches.
Edit: then you fold the 12.01 inch side against the 11 inch side to get a 1.01 inch measurement
Not exact, but good enough if you need to know your neck size to buy a fancy shirt online - not that I would ever waste my corporation’s time that way!
And most people here know that an A4 is 21 (exactly) by 30 (roughly) cm, which you can use (surprisingly) use for measurement aswell.
21x29.7
This number is permanently stored in my memory, just like 1€ = 6.55957F
I didn’t know Euro and Farad were related :O
