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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

  • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    To be fair, A4 yields unwieldy pages that are too long to comfortably read. And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?

    • ValiantDust@feddit.de
      28·
      1 month ago

      I do this all the time. I print two pages on one A4 sheet (or rather four, two on each side) and then fold them so they are like a leaflet.

      That’s the main advantage of the system – you don’t have to design things differently depending on how big you want to print them. You can scale the same design to an A6 flyer or an A2 Poster.

    • Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it
      23·
      1 month ago

      And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?

      When you want to read it more comfortably for example.

    • Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de
      10·
      1 month ago

      almost all consumer printers are for a4.
      i had (rare) occasions where i wanted to print a picture for an a3 sized frame and was able to glue together two a4 prints.

      also, as far as im aware, books in a4 size actually consist of a3 sheets bound together in the middle. (same with other sized books)

      • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        28 days ago

        almost all consumer printers are for a4.

        I never said A4 wasn’t the standard. I said it’s not a good one.

        books in a4 size actually consist of a3 sheets bound together in the middle. (same with other sized books)

        Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm [Edit: 21cm × 15cm] (A5).

        Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

    • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 month ago

      Where I’m from, it’s super common to print A4 in half size and fold them into a little booklet when you need to distribute a few pages to loads of people