I am so glad I use open street map and other projects which use it such as Organic Maps. Truly a godsend
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
I’ll always upvote Matt Parker
Solution: use bigger pieces of paper. EZ
Yep. A0 for everything! It’s the only perfect size.
My day is ruined
And before you ask, of course there’s an easy system for various sizes that all relate to each other.
What did you think? That we hadn’t thought this through?
Where the aspect ratio is the only one where this pattern is possible (1:sqrt(2)) and A0 has an area of exactly one square metre :3
I never understood why we use ISO guidelines for everything in Chile, metric system and so on… except for paper sizes 🤦♂️
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.
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
Why does A4 have an odd number of millimeters? Why not 290, flat?
Because not enough people know about the B size standard, which has much more reasonable widths.
Pretty sure the geometry of the image is off, despite the numbers being correct. The even sizes are slightly too square and the odd sizes are slightly too narrow. It makes me feel like somebody accidentally compressed the entire image horizontally before overlaying text over it.
Below is my attempt at remaking the image:
0.25 * 2^0.25
A0 is a square meter. Its sides are self similar, such that the ratio of long to short edge stays the same when you cut one in the middle, and thus create a new long and short edge.
Each cut produces two sheets of the next Ax number, so A4 is four times halved compared to A0, or a sixteenth of a square meter.
That property of being able to halve is achieved with a ratio of the square root of 2, so unfortunately the measurements in absolute numbers get pretty odd.
Add in the fact that paper manufacturers round the numbers down, that “perfect” half size goes out the window immediately on the first division. And gets worse as the paper size gets smaller.
Paper arbitrage. The globalists are stealing 51mm2 from you, wake up sheeple!
Even A0 isn’t usually actually a square meter - 1189mm x 841mm = 999949mm2
Though, the other common rounding (1190mm) results in an area of 1000790mm2, so we’re coming out ahead on that one.(this message brought to you by "why aren’t we using B" gang)
Definitions and math:
- A series paper has a height/width ratio of √2
- Each paper in the series is half the area of the last
- A0 has an area of exactly 1m²
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.
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.
It’s getting to be outdated for the US too - while the size is still around, it’s getting pretty rare outside of direct consumer sales. I’ve written several systems that have generated tens of millions of letters for various official communications, and all of the government direct-mailing systems have used A-series paper (or US legal - as far as I’m aware there’s no ISO equivalent to US legal?).
A4 is the closest thing to US Letter. I don’t think there is anything close to US Legal (aspect ratio is all wrong). I’ve never received a single A-sized government letter, but I would love to be pleasantly surprised someday.
I mean… Do you regularly measure your mail? I’m sure there’s still printers out there that run on letter, but they’re becoming far less common. Perhaps your region is the holdout.
You’re right, of course. I don’t, but next time I will. I grew up with A4 and can usually tell from the aspect ratio by eye, but yeah I’m not paper size Rainman either, so it’s possible I’ve never noticed.
Canada should drive on the left to really stick it to the yanks.
Ho ho, let’s not overreact
How would that even work? Do you expect the passenger to operate a shotgun with their left hand/eye? Just shove their entire body out the window?
Why would that upset New Englanders only? Pretty sure this would upset every American, not just the Yanks.
Hehe. Nope, you’re all yanks mate, Australia has you pegged too.
I’m pretty sure it would upset all North Americans, not just the yanks. Dropping US bs doesn’t need to mean picking up UK bs
Oh, we would never call someone from Canada or Mexico a Yank. That would be inaccurate and offensive.
Exactly, just like how calling anyone outside of New England a “Yank” is offensive, you fucking hypocrite.
Canadians should also use “yank” as a synonym for all Americans, because that really upsets them.
Oh right, already done.
Yanks = all Americans
Hardly…
Yanks, Sox, Cubs, A’s, 'Stros…
I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about yank
Understandable. What slang do I call you?
I like beans on toast.
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
No more
PC LOAD LETTER.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.
Damn, that Mercator projection making A4 look almost as big as Greenland…
Remember Africa is about three times larger than Canada
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?
Pretty insane to consider that sort of scale, this projection really distorts reality
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
It’s based on the 1m² A0, fold it in half to get A1 and so on.
The proportions stays the same too
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.
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.
