Nooo... Dunder mifflin will be out of business!
Paper sizes
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: Paper sizes
#32Is this the place to bring "inches vs cm" on the table ? :p
It's not the place, but not that you've brought it, as an American I say imperial units can go die in a fire.
Re: Paper sizes
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing crazy here. It just means that if the length of the long side is √2 times the size of short side. That has the nice property that you can bisect the sheet and get two smaller sheets where the ratio between the long and short edges is maintained, which makes it standardising a whole bunch of other things much more straightforward.
I believe that gp's point is that this is impossible, what with √2 being an irrational number. It is pretty close (4 significant digits), but of course not exact.
It's not that big a deal: once you have a basic page size that's close enough, it's just a matter of slicing it in two. In practice, any error is too small to matter.
Re: Paper sizes
#34I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a shitty format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems. There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually... A5 booklet pri…
The point is: An A5 booklet on A4 is the same as A4 booklet on A3, etc.
No its not. In fact its completely unrelated because when making book you should care for aspects like font size and text body layout which follow an ergonomic perspective.
E.g. the same booklet layout on a3 wouldn't work at all because the font would be huge. Keep the font size small and you have really long lines...
Re: Paper sizes
#35I've lived in the US and also in a country that used the A-series extensively. While I've always appreciated the beauty and math of the A-series, I find the aspect-ratio of the US Letter paper to be much more appealing. A4 tends to be too long and too narrow.
From the article: > US Letter: 216 mm x 279 mm > A4: 210 mm × 297 mm so it's 18mm longer while being 6mm narrower. At that small a difference, I would assume that a preference of one over the other is similar to that of metric vs. imperial - the one you were raised on just seems right . Which one did you grow up with?
It's just that you can resize everything while still keeping the same portions with the A* paper while with the US formats you just have to redesign everything.
Re: Paper sizes
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was like talking to a brick wall. A very dumb brick wall that couldn't get it through their head that the units didn't matter, and that what mattered was the ratio.
The A0 being 1m^2 is important too, if you're ordering paper by area?
Yeah, but that's really a different argument. Once you get the ratio argument, you get the utility of the system.
Re: Paper sizes
#37I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a shitty format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems. There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually... A5 booklet pri…
> There is no way to get a proper layout done This is puzzling - how do you explain the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with this whatsoever? Finally: I have seen lots and lots of A4 books, but they're simply not as common. It probably does help to live in Europe in that regard.
Are you a bookmaker? The are the ones with the problems. ;)
> I have seen lots and lots of A4 books
And they all have suboptimal layouts.
Re: Paper sizes
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha that thread is great... good old metric system.
It was like talking to a brick wall. A very dumb brick wall that couldn't get it through their head that the units didn't matter, and that what mattered was the ratio.
> It was like talking to a brick wall.
I know those types of conversations. They stay with you for months and sometimes years, never ceasing to irritate.
Re: Paper sizes
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is: An A5 booklet on A4 is the same as A4 booklet on A3, etc.
No its not. In fact its completely unrelated because when making book you should care for aspects like font size and text body layout which follow an ergonomic perspective. E.g. the same booklet layout on a3 wouldn't work at all because the font would be huge. Keep the font size small and you have really long lines...
I regularly print out A4 documents two-to-a-page side-by-side on my office printer. It saves paper, its easier to carry around, and it works just fine. No distortion.
If your docs are US Letter, how well do they print out scaled down two-to-a-page side-by-side?
Re: Paper sizes
#40I've tried in the past to explain how awesome the sqrt(2) ratio used as the basis of DIN/ISO page sizes is, but there are some very dumb people on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821947
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of the guy you were arguing with in that thread was that the Ax standard was defined in terms of SI units as the US imperial units are?