The A standard is not as perfect as you might think. Because the paper manufacturers round that perfect root 2 down to a whole integer in size every time, there is accumulated error in every size.
You might not notice a millimeter or two on an A1, but as the size of the paper gets smaller, the error gets bigger because of the rounding.
It really doesn’t matter in practice. Important part is that you can fold A4 into A5
My day is ruined
I would certainly hope so. I was personally crushed to find out that that it wasn’t as perfect as people seem to blindly think.
I’ll always upvote Matt Parker
Solution: use bigger pieces of paper. EZ
Yep. A0 for everything! It’s the only perfect size.
Not a meme; I am an American and I think this would be the exact right kind of petty bullshit to respond with, please push for this, Canadians. It is exactly this kind of petty, stupid bullshit that Trump participates in and responds most to.
American style petty bullshit isn’t going to accomplish anything. This kind of thing costs Canadians and doesn’t impact the US at all. This is the exact kind of petty bullshit Trump does regularly since it’s popular with Americans.
British Columbia basically did a similar thing by declaring permanent daylight savings time because, according to the premier, they’re no longer going to wait for the US to move as well before moving themselves.
Except now the situation is objectively worse than it was before, because BC is geographically in the UTC-8 zone, but permanent Pacific Daylight Time is the same as permanent Mountain Standard Time (UTC-7). Except they don’t call it Mountain Standard Time in BC, they stubbornly continue to insist they’re in the UTC-8 zone. Except they don’t call it “Pacific Daylight Time” either, they call it just “Pacific Time”. No “Daylight”. Despite the fact that their standard time is what the rest of North America calls Mountain Time.
They had four good choices, and chose none of them:
- UTC-8 year round, call it “Pacific Standard Time”
- UTC-7 year round, call it “Mountain Standard Time”
- UTC-8 or UTC-7 year round, call it “Western Canada Time”.
Decent idea, rubbish execution.
They probably just saved some paperwork. Anyway, all people care were the time zone difference, not name
The name causes confusion. Let me give you this example. What time UTC would “17:00 PT” be?
That question depends now not only on what time of year it is, but also where. “Pacific Time” now no longer uniquely identifies a single timekeeping scheme.
What I understood was PT is UTC-7, PDT is UTC-7 and PST is UTC-8, am I right? I am guessing in Canada you all were refering to PST and PDT as ‘pacific time’ and that causes confusion?
“Pacific Time” means “whatever the civil time is in the Pacific Time Zone, accounting for daylight saving time”. So that would be 23:04 (UTC-7) as of writing.
If today’s date were instead 30 December, “Pacific Time” would be 22:04 (UTC-8) in Washington, Oregon, and California, while it would be 23:04 (UTC-7) in British Columbia and Yukon. Both would be called “Pacific Time” despite not being the same time, and both being on standard time.
Why call it anything? UTC-7 or -8 are explicit, less confusing internationally & shorter
Because UTC-7 and UTC-8 are also wrong. The label “Pacific Time” means, in the United States and Mexico, the civil time standard that observes standard time at UTC-8 and daylight saving time at UTC-7. You cannot call this standard merely “UTC-8” because then it’s wrong half of the year.
It is important to note that by calling year-round UTC-7 “Pacific Time”, British Columbia and Yukon are the ones stepping out of the programme to do something idiosyncratic. The rest of the Pacific Time Zone (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, and Baja California) has a greater population than the entirety of Canada. There are approximately 56 million residents of the non-Canadian portion of the Pacific Time Zone, where standard time is UTC-8, compared to 5 million in the Canadian portion, which is UTC-7.
There is truth in meming
Please 🙏
Why is it ledger or tabloid? Why do I have to remember the orientation?
Orientation of paper? Woke gone mad smh my head
Typical Siberia and Greenland doing a lot of work here
On the other hand Nunavut is hidden behind the A4.
I want to use uninhabitable wasteland to decide my stationary shape as much as the next guy, but this is pure deceit.
(US standard is horrendous btw)
It’s pure deceit because the map is accurate? What should they do instead? Hide Siberia and Greenland? Use Gall-Peters projection and let Africa do a lot of work instead? What difference does it make which yellow part is bigger when it’s pretty much all yellow?
Yes, yes, Dymaxion, colour
Oh, let’s also remember that A4 is a member of beautiful variant of an “SI system for paper”. Want a paper the size of an A4 folded double? We have A8. Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.
- Statement: “I want a piece of paper that I can fold twice to get exactly a US letter size.”
- Response: “You must be crazy.”
And IIRC A0 is 1 m².
Beautiful.
really really close to, but not quite.
The aspect ratio of the A series of paper is √2, so every doubling or halving of the size retains the same aspect ratio. If you want to save paper and print at half size, you can just do that and it works flawlessly. However doing it this way means very unmemorable decimal unit dimensions.
Half letter and tabloid are much taller than letter so you have to either have overly large margins on the top and bottom, or you have to reformat your document if you ever want to change the sizes.
Though specialty paper suppliers do sell 22x17 paper if you really want to double fold to get letter paper. 11x17 is twice the width of letter which works for printing bifold books in letter size. Its just the scaling aspect ratio thing. Sizes in multiples for bookmaking do exist in both systems.
What’s the next step up after A0?
2A0, and next 4A0, but there are rarely used. From A0 you mostly print from rolls, so you define the width. Large offset printing presses use formats that allow multiple A sized pages, either single or double for binding, and the needed trims.j
I’m going to open the world’s first 256A0 print shop
They do have a paper that can fold once to get a US letter though; i am only posting about it because i only learned about it two years ago: 11x17, aka, “tabloid” size.
Some desktop printers can even print on it.
“Letter” size is standardized as ANSI A, “Tabloid” as ANSI B, and something that could be folded twice to get letter would be ANSI C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Standardized_American_paper_sizes
These paper sizes are used in engineering.
does all this A paper standerd business have to do with the fact that you can’t fold any paper in half more than 8 times?
I feel like to really bust the myth they should have then unfolded it to make sure it was still intact.
What on earth are you on about with those numbers? 😅
A0 is the base size, with an area of one square meter. Fold that in half and you get A1. Fold that in half and you get A2, and so on. Regular printer paper is A4. You’ll rarely, if ever, see sizes smaller than A6.
I fat-fingered the A5, otherwise the numbers were right?
I’m aware how the system works, I just wrote about it using A4 as the “base”. A3 is what you fold to get A4, A2 folds to give A3, etc.
I didn’t know A0 was exactly 1m2 though, TIL!
Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.
This made it sound like you meant that folding an A3 sheet twice gives A2 😅 Might just be my reading comprehension, though!
The print shop I worked at did everything at size C1, but they were a blueprint shop
Cs are the envelope sizes.
That’s really weird.
c1 is approx. 3 feet long by 2 feet other long. we did lots of stuff you could roll out or hang on the wall.
I was hoping that there was a metric baseline for this paper size, but it still bugs me that the dimensions aren’t “even”. 297mm? That’s no better than 8 1/2 inches.
I see what you’re saying, but the «weird» dimensions are what makes the whole thing with folding in half to get the next size work:
The aspect ratio has to be 1 to the root of 2 for it to work, and that’s going to make some dimensions «uneven». The utility of that system is worth it many times over!
There is, but A4 isn’t the baseline, A0 is.
A0 is 1m² with a ratio of 1:√2. Cut that in half along the larger side and you have A1, half it again and you have A2, etc. on down the line.
The entire series maintains the same exact ratio down to A13 at 9mmx13mm.
So ridiculously dedicated to metric that they didn’t think to make A0 an exponent of 2, and then designed an entire system around dividing it by 2.
A0 should’ve been 1.024 meters.
You’d still get «weird» lengths in the other dimension, though. Remember, the aspect ratio has to be 1 to the root of 2 for the folding in half to work.
Also, I don’t think 1024 would have been such an obvious number back in the late 1700’s, when this system was first thought up 😅
There is a system of sizes where the shortest side of the base size is exactly 1 meter, though: the B system. The aspect ratio is the same as for the A sizes.
1 is an even power of two. 1 = 20
It’s based on the 1m² A0, fold it in half to get A1 and so on.
The proportions stays the same too
I have a pocket notebook size A7. A6 is too big for some pockets.
There is 11"×17", it’s called Ledger paper.
This doesn’t make the american system okay.
? Ledger paper has to do with the green lines, not the size
Oh, sick! I think you mean paper designed for accounting, i.e., ledgers, while Grey is referring to the US standard size of the same name almost certainly named for that purpose.
Bingo bango.
american sizes do the same thing, just only five steps in ANSI sizes, and not really that well known outside of the industries that use the paper sizes, such as printing shops.
smallest being u.s. letter (A4 equivalent) is “ANSI A”, 8.5x11in…
largest being the full sheet (A0 equivalent) is “ANSI E”, 34x44in…
with the expected three steps between for B, C, and D.
going smaller than u.s. letter and ANSI A… letter halved (4.25x5.5in) ‘half letter’ is a common notepad and post card size; and halved again (2.12x2.75in) is a common label size.
A4 folded is A5
Yes, I did a typy-type with chubby morning fingers
A85?! That’s gotta be minuscule!
with A4’s divide-by-two shtick an A85 might unironically have a surface area of only like a couple atoms. it’s too late in the night for me to calculate this so i pass this task onto someone else
So, A0 has an area of 1 m2 and it’s halved for each next one in the series, giving A85 a surface area of 1/(285) m2 = 2.585×10-26 m2 = 0.02585 pm2.
The smallest atom is the hydrogen atom with a Van der Waals radius of 120 pm which gives it a surface area of 4×π×1202 pm2 = 180956 pm2 or just over 7 million times larger than the A85.
And that’s how you choose a system over another,because it gets things easier
I’d argue 8.5" isn’t even used. Half an inch is 12.7mm, 8.5" ≈ 215.9mm. Most machines are calibrated using SI, so they’ll do ~216mm instead, and then what’s the point, just discard US Letter
I’m honestly shocked by anyone south of the US not using the SI system considering they use metric otherwise.
Damn, that Mercator projection making A4 look almost as big as Greenland…
Remember Africa is about three times larger than Canada
Pretty insane to consider that sort of scale, this projection really distorts reality
Wonder how big a3 is then
That’s the neat part, it’s twice the size of A4, and half the size of A2.
So almost 2 greenlands or 2 almost greenlands?
At least 2 football fields
It’s a map of the largest PDF, world for scale
Ah, you mean like this: https://alexwlchan.net/2024/big-pdf/
I propose a new standard for printing.
Laser-etchable circular paper with 2 holes in middle which helps rotate it on a spindle, and hang it without unvanted rotation.
The printer will have a spindle with 2 prongs, and single axis movable laser assembly used to etch the paper as it spins.So like a vinyl record but made from paper?
They’ve described optical media, so like a vinyl record but it’s a cd instead.
Why circular paper?
n + 1 standards
I’m American and have worked in corporate offices all my life and grew up around the printing industry.
A4/SI is super common here too. “Letter” is just something used by home users. But very often A4 is sold as “Letter A4” right next to the other paper.
Now “legal” print format is a true abomination and unfortunately is much less likely to be easily replaced.
Why is legal?
Lots of legal documents in the US are required to be filed in 216mm × 356mm (sometimes 330mm, both are considered standard and fit where necessary), everything from court orders to congressional acts and those stupid executive orders the orange fascist loves to sign about anything that he manages to think about for more then 2 minutes.
But the bigger problem is that the size is also standardized on the storage and processing side, so switching sizes means we would have to change all the governmental filing cabinets, folders, folios, binders, etc too, which is slightly less likely than us finally adopting the metric system.
Thanks!
Really? I’ll need to pay closer attention next time I go to Target or Office Depot…
I am so glad I use open street map and other projects which use it such as Organic Maps. Truly a godsend
Let’s decide on a global standard before everyone realizes it’s cheaper to do business the old way, with pens, papers and filing cabinets.
So we could save some trees if we all agreed to one standard size??
No, but we could definitely save some trees if we had less papers and more online systems… providing they’re done correctly and not leaking around everyone’s data.
No, I have no idea why you came to this conclusion?
No more
PC LOAD LETTER.Fun fact: ISO paper sizes are a transposition of German DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) sizes.
The German’s obsession for standards is their main usefulness to humanity.
Fun fact, there is a standard butt & a standard shit accoding to the DIN.
I dunno… I feel like I’ve dealt with enough German machinery and bureaucracy for 3 lifetimes.
Their “obsession” for standards is only for the standard of making everything 10 times more complicated than it needs to be.
Their greatest usefullness, not “main”. Some people would much rather have bratwurst than a4 paper.
I spend all year waiting for fest style beers, so yeah they’ve got a few great ideas
