I think this is a little bit outdated at least for the Philippines. Goverment documents now primarily use A4 to comply with ISO standards. Some places such as schools may sometimes use the letter size (commonly referred to as short size here) but A4 is now much more common.
Is that the Philippines out there all alone?
Why does A4 have an odd number of millimeters? Why not 290, flat?
The answer is actually fairly interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series
Since A series sizes share the same aspect ratio, they can be scaled to other A series sizes without being distorted, and two sheets can be reduced to fit on exactly one sheet without any cutoff or margins.
Canada almost switched in the 1970s, but lost its nerve
TBH, I thought they did use A4- seems to me the letters I got from BanQ in Quebec were A4
Quebec does things differently, often simply out of spite for the rest of the country. So I won’t be surprised if they have adopted A4 provincially
Surprised that many countries use the US version
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
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’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.
Really? I’ll need to pay closer attention next time I go to Target or Office Depot…
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 A
85. 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.”
Edit: Did a fat-fingering
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?
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.
And IIRC A0 is 1 m².
Beautiful.
really really close to, but not quite.
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.
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.
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!
And that’s how you choose a system over another,because it makes things easier
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 honestly shocked by anyone south of the US not using the SI system considering they use metric otherwise.
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
Only used A sizes through my academic career. I know that was a long time ago but even going to stores they list a4/5 as sizes.
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)
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?
