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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.

Source: Financial Times

  • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
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    5 months ago

    Scalability. You can design something in A3/A4 and if you want the page in a smaller, common format, you can print it as A4/A5. This is especially handy for designing flyers, or scaling bigger stuff (like schematics, which are usually drawn on A1/A2) down to print it on household printers.

    It’s also quite convenient that pretty much anyone has a common understading of what A3/A4/A5/A6 is, when talking about areas in real life.

    Also, if you need A5 put only have A4 paper, you can cut it or even split it without scissors. That usually even gets better results, because splitting a piece of paper in two by folding is easier to do precisely that to do it whith scissors.

    Making a page longer just to “fit more stuff on it” isnwt really such a great boon, since you always need a cut-off somewhere.

    A4 can be folded into thirds as well and smaller envelopes are perfect for A6.

    • yukijoou@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      yeah, this is a great thing!

      i usually make class notes recap on A4 pages, and can then print 2 A5-sized pages side by side on a single standard A4 paper, no need to rework the formatting. messing with the printer options, you can pretty easily get it to do a small booklet off of your standard A4 word document, just need to staple it together!

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      5 months ago

      It’s also quite convenient that pretty much anyone has a common understading of what A3/A4/A5/A6 is, when talking about areas in real life.

      We know “the size of a sheet of printer paper” and also that size when “folded hot dog” or “folded hamburger”.

      Y’all can’t fold ‘em fish ‘n’ chips, ever heard any food terms used to refer to length/wide folding?