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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.
As a math nerd, I appreciate the fractaline nature of your paper.
But as an american, what is the practical advantage?? The sizes are so far apart, and you dont get papers with different ratios? Like for example Letter and Legal are both 8.5 inches wide, can be used in any standard cheap household printer, legal is just longer so you can fit more stuff on the page. Letter paper folds into thirds to fit snuggly in an envelope and legal folds into fourths. Other paper sizes are so niche and rarely used why does it matter if theyre a perfect mathematical ratio or not?
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.
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!
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?
Commercial printers will print most everything on A0 paper, but since all metric paper is doubling or halving sizes with respect to each other, they can tile a bunch of print jobs into the same A0 paper and then cut them apart, saving machine time by turning a bunch of small jobs into one big job.
US printers also do this, just using larger ANSI sizes instead of larger A sizes. Or they just use rolls.
But US paper sizes don’t tile nearly as well as metric paper sizes do, is the point
The advantage is folding.
When folded at the middle it becomes the next size.
So if you have an A4 paper but don’t have the proper C4 envelope, you can fold the paper in half and put it in a C5 envelope. This is standard.
Let’s then imagine that you don’t have a C5 envelope either, but only have the remaining Christmas card envelopes, which are C6. So you just fold your paper one more time at the middle and it’ll fit again.
Also, the area of A0 is 1 square meter. You probably don’t nornally have an A0 paper around, but that doesn’t matter, because you can take 8 pieces of A3 or 16 pieces of A4 papers, tape them together and it’ll be A0.
Now it isn’t actually a square meter. It’s the same area, but it’s not square. No, the length and width makes the golden fucking ratio. This might be irrelevant for a legal document, but it’s pretty neat if you want to make a nice drawing.
Paper come in reams. Reams come in boxes. Boxes come on pallets. The paper boxes fit perfectly on a pallet in both length and width, so the layers of boxes can be placed either way in an interlocked pattern. This is mostly a ix design thing though. American paper also fit on American pallets, but without the connection through the sizes, you cannot make a pallet with mixed sizes and expect it to fit.
Isn’t the ratio of length and width of A-papers square root of 2 and not the golden ratio?
Correct. A piece of paper with the golden (aspect) ratio would have the property that if you remove the large square (with side length equal to the shortest side of the rectangle) then the remaining rectangle has the same (golden) aspect ratio.
The ISO216 ratio of 1:sqrt(2) has the property that if you cut the paper in half then both halves have the same aspect ratio as the original larger piece.
People tend to confuse these two properties as they both involve the remaining rectangle having the same aspect ratio as the original piece, but the process to bisect the sheet is different.
But that’s not something i have ever actually needed.
Well, more efficient packaging and shipping is a pretty good goal in general. Although what’s better is just…not having to ship pallets of paper around, it’s 20 fucking 24.
Limitless paper in a paperless world
You say that, but you pay a premium for these things to be generally less efficient. Why waste?
Just use multiple pages if needed?
Who needs all their words on a single huge page like some sort of scroll?
It takes less paper to print 1 page of legal if that’s what your text fits on than it does 2 pages of normal paper if said text doesn’t take up all of the second piece of paper.
When you’re printing large documents (10 or more pages let’s say) that starts to be significant savings in thickness of a stack, too.
It’s not one huge page, it’s an extra 2 inches, or ~25% longer
dude devastated americans xD
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.
You really think people are too dumb to remember 2 letter codes that are literally printed on everything? Come on man :D
yes, thats why i always was confused when i heared people online talk about pc load letter.
i kinda assumed it was just an odd way to refer to paper that some manufacturers used
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.
Interesting, no photos of that message come up.
TBF, I only remember messages about “out of paper” or “all trays are empty”. Why specify paper size if the printer accepts different ones, anyway?
Well, one still could do it like how many countries transitioned to the metric system: slap the traditional names onto things that are actually now defined by the metric system, like how China’s catty, about 0.60478… kg, became 0.5kg. Just slap “Letter” onto A4.
That’s going to make some driver developers very upset. And sensors in printer cartridges that can sense both A4 and Letter.
I say we just balls the whole thing. Screen or pencils.
For technical purposes that need to handle both you can just disambiguate it with “Letter (new)” and “Letter (work or school)”
Is that a subtle dig at Microsoft and their 5 billion different versions of Teams?
Eh, letter’s height to width ratio looks better.
America got someone triggered over paper.
Shooting ourselves in the face to own the mets
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!
Oh no, it’s getting worse!
How does that work? 8.5^2 + 11^2 is 193.25, square root of that is 13.9. Where does 12.01 come from?
Huh. . That’s weird. I could swear I double checked my math before I posted this One Dumb Trick online years and years ago…
Found the mistake, I had skipped a step, updated original post
Oh, that makes a lot more sense now.
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
Not only that, if you know your A4, you can do all paper sizes in you head: A3 has A4’s long side as it’s short side, and A4’s short side x2 for it’s long side. Rinse and repeat.
I didn’t know Euro and Farad were related :O
What a nightmare
Oh, that’s simple and useful.
Not exact
The motto of the whole imperial unit system.
Not-super-fun fact: you can measure in metric with school notebook paper.
Each sqare is 0.5 by 0.5 mm.
I love how that OP’s solution requires an inexact technique to achieve an even less exact measurement. Like Americans really out here being proud of the stupidest shit
I use it a lot if i need to draw something that is x long. If you do a lot of graphs for example you can use the measurements on your ruler.
Correcting myself: 0.5 cm, not mm.
For graphs you can use graph paper with 1 mm grid.
Tiny nitpick: I think you meant 0.5 by 0.5 cm (or 5 by 5 mm).
Yes, sorry. You are correct
Also there is coordinate paper:
1 by 1 mm.
Is this why my printer has wierd size “letter”, that is not sized like letter?
Yeah, US software always defaults to their own non-compliant standards instead of looking at the location and determining the default that way.
That is why we in Europe and all the other parts of the world get these strange fuzzy prints where the text is almost unreadable, and is cut off on strange parts in the text.
This sounds like our bad, sorry.
My country (not USA) uses American paper. I hate it.
1.414, the magic number.
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?
Are you american? If so, the “unwieldy and too long” is probably because you’re not used to it. I’m not used to letter-size and it seems weirdly short and unnecessarily wide but I know it’s because I’m just not used to it.
I’m German. If the pages are a comfortable size, why does no publisher ever use A5 or A4 paper? To quote an answer I gave to another comment here:
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 (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.
Another hint that the paper format is weird is that scientific papers on A4 are always either printed in two columns or use the ninths rule for margins, i.e. 1/9 of margin on the inner and upper edges and 2/9 of margin on the outer and bottom edges, essentially throwing away almost half of the page (I’ll admit there are more economic recommendations of 1/11 or 1/13). This is to make the columns narrower to get closer to the target of 60–80 characters per line. Note also that this makes the ‘usable’ area approximately 20cm long, which is much closer to the American’s ‘Legal’ format (216mm).
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 (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.
A5 is not 15x10,5
If A4 is 291x210 then OBVIOUSLY the next one starts with 210: 210x148.
You’re right. Sorry for getting my post-7pm arithmetic skills on you. However, my point still stands. ‘Close’ is not ‘conforming’ to the standard.
These are very valid arguments that can’t be reduced to a lack of habit. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
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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.
A4 is 17.6mm longer than an 8.5x11" sheet of paper.
And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?
I’m sold, we should botch all other formats for origami
I use the “A5 booklet” function all the time.
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.
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)
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 (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.
Lmao, it does not.
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
What the fuck, that was way more hilarious than a blog post about financial securities messaging ought to have been
TIL that there are different standards of paper sizes in other parts of the world. I never encountered this before despite living in Germany for 10 years, probably because the last time I was there was 30 years ago.
What NA does not do this what the fuck, backwards ass country in so many ways.
Right but this is definitely the most prominent & important reason
Wait a second if the bank app can’t transfer money how do they do it? Just barter with guns? Are the bullets like coins?
We have a fee-free bank-to-bank transfer system that is based on pre-digital technology that takes 2-3 business days. We often call it “direct deposit” or automated clearing house (ACH). It’s often used for payroll and paying bills.
Now, we could probably make this payment system instantaneous relatively effortlessly (and thus useful for regular in-store purchases), but the banks lobby against this so they can continue to charge us fees and interest to over-use credit cards. (Interestingly enough, credit and debit cards all use direct deposit on the backend to actual transfer funds between parties).
This is all fine and dandy for most people because they simply can’t imagine doing things a more consumer-friendly way.
I imagine it has also something to do with safety? Like, if it was instantaneous, that means you can do damage instantaneously, or a hacker might have fewer hurdles to go through.
Your comment is all true, except - we CAN all imagine it, but as you pointed out, our unchecked hyper capitalism prevents it
We have a fee-free bank-to-bank transfer system that is based on pre-digital technology that takes 2-3 business days. We often call it “direct deposit” or automated clearing house (ACH).
Ah, right, kinda like SEPA Credit Transfer. You do need a persons IBAN which is a bit long, but their name is validated so you usually send it to the right person.
Now, we could probably make this payment system instantaneous relatively effortlessly
Ooh, cool, kinda like SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, which transfers money within ten seconds to bank accounts using the above mentioned number.
This is all fine and dandy for most people because they simply can’t imagine doing things a more consumer-friendly way
And that’s why, in the Netherlands, Tikkie took the country by storm. It is an app that allows you to use iDEAL (a web-based payment system, soon rolled out in Germany and Belgium as Vero) to send money to friends. Usually takes one pin and three taps to send it, and have it instantly appear on the account of the recipient.
We involve third parties to help spy on our transactions.
It’s OK, they charge us for the privilege.
Wtf?
Also are banks just dumb or what? Has it crossed their greedy minds that they also can charge to make transfers?
What’s pictured there is when people use Venmo to pay for something instead of just transferring money between friends. The fee is paid by the seller. Banks already do this for traditional sellers in the US which is why you’ll see signs asking for cash instead of cards.
And tax evasion. But I don’t care as long as the tamales are good.
Do Visa, Mastercard, etc, not charge transaction fees in Europe? The only place I’ve been where there’s no transaction fees paid by the vendor is China.
I’m in Australia and it’s a mix. Some places add the surcharge to the bill and can use cc for as low as$1, some don’t and don’t accept payments that’s less than 2 people’s meals ( and also don’t accept split bills).
But it’s very very hard to find a place that’s cash only. It comes to mind empanadas, so I got a laugh at the other reply about tamales.
I owned a business in Europe. My bank charged me a pretty low monthly flat fee for card charges, so I would take cards for any amount.
i just assumed people used 3rd party services for ease of use or faster transactions, seems so wild that you’d not be able to send money using your bank to me
here it takes 1-2 business day for a free wire transfer from one bank account to another, and you can do it in your banking app or on the bank’s website. you just need to authenticate with your online pin code. you can also pay 1€ to get a <24h transfer
it’s honestly much better than using a third party service, since pretty much everyone has a bank account, and pays using a card tied to that account directly
Brasil enters the chat
No fees transfer takes seconds, as long as it’s not international. People use it for buying groceries, clothes or paying for whatever they buy in the middle of the street from other people who are not businesses. Confirmation of payment from receivers end is immediate with a push on your phone.
All sellers can produce a QR code including receiver address and price to be payed. All bank apps scan and pay seamlessly.
Quite similar to India’s UPI system
Russia enters the chat.
Same. It is done with National Payment System of Cards law, which people usually call “MIR cards”. It started as replacement system for visa and mastercard, but evolved into System of Fast Payments/Transactions.
You can use it in three ways: enter recepient’s card number, enter recepient’s phone number or use qr code.
Idk what all this talk is about - we have wire transfers in the US. I don’t need a third party to do it either, it’s exactly as you’ve described, I can do one through the bank’s app or on their website, and it’s free. It’s not as common though since the information required is: Name of the recipient’s account exactly as it is, account #, routing #, and exact name of the bank tied to the routing #. You can save that info though to make it easier to transfer the next time around - it’s very useful for close family and friends.
and it’s free
This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I’m not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I’m aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient’s side for incoming wire transfer.
They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks’ sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.
In Canada we have Interact e-Transfer. Basically all the banks colluded to make a system that allows for instant money transfer between banks using email or phone number as the recipient identifier, along with options for comments and security questions.
I felt like this was a huge step up compared to all the hoops and third party apps I had to use in Europe.
huh, yeah, i heard of similar things in the US
here it seems to be worked out through legislation though, rather than private deals, but that means it’s much slower to get set in place
Venmo, Zelle, Cash app, etc.
My last 3 banks all had ACH transfers in-app, too, so idk what they’re smoking
ACH transfer to a friend’s bank account?
I assume it’s ACH, I’m at work and my job includes doing ACH work so that just kinda typed out.
It has me put their routing and account number in, then took anywhere from 5 minutes to a day to clear, p sure that’s ACH
Wow awesome!
A day isn’t cool, but five minutes is pretty much acceptable.
I’m in Aus and our transfers are usually instant. However if you’re transferring a couple hundred bucks or more, and you haven’t made a transfer before to a person, it will hold it for a day. I think to give the customer time to call and say the transfer was fraudulent.
I respect that!
I pay monthly rent in Australia with that, couple thousands and no big deal
And the ACH only takes three business days!
3 days? UK here, the other day I transferred money to my wife (different bank) while she was handing her card to the cashier at the supermarket. It took about 1 second.
Surely there’s some challenger bank letting you do modern stuff?
Hahaha! We don’t have fair competition in America, silly!
Yeah they’re just making shit up, and it’s anti American so Lemmy assumes it’s true.
Actually, a lot of banking apps can be used to transfer money now, it’s just done through Zelle. We can also do a bank transfer using the routing and account number (at least with my banking app) but that I think takes longer.
SEPA is not to take for granted.
Isn’t sepa the eu system?
Sorry but bank transfers are not 1st world exclusive, it’s common place in 3rd world as well.
do they go down to A -1, A -2 and so on
Not officially, but unofficially there’s 2A0, 4A0 and so on. Bigger than that is rarely used however.
No just A0, A1, etc. A5 being for cards, A4 being the average used in schoolbooks and such, with A3 mainly used for posters, never seen anything larger in everyday life.
Ad posters on the street are usually A2 to A0
