111–120 of 206 posts
Please ban letter size, ever been at the printer realsing nothing printed and facing PC Load letter message? Ever been in a foreign country trying to find your home countries legal size of paper in a local store? I think we should switch to metric, a4 paper and right hand driving.
All of the countries using US Letter already drive on the right hand side...
Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
Americans didn't simplify and streamline the English language, certainly not intentionally. If you're talking about the spelling thing, there were no standard spellings at the time when the US broke away from Britain; standards were independently created at a later date.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.
To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
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raldi didn't say that anyone was or wasn't being dumb. He said that "instead of BLAMING OTHERS for [x], YOU might want to [y]". Blaming others is a poor lifestyle adaptation. Whether or not the other guy was actually dumb or not isn't relevant.
Who was blaming anybody?
"I have tried in the past to explain how awesome the ratio is, but it didn't go well because of dumb people."
You are correct that you're not blaming anyone for being dumb, but you are blaming others for the explanation not going well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, I repeated told him that the units didn't matter, and that it was the ratio that mattered. Other than disengaging sooner (which I would've done if I'd any cop-on myself), what could I have said differently? I'm truly at a loss. I straight-up wrote this: > _The units are irrelevant._ That's what you're not getting. What is relevant is that the same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page…
You say that "same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page sizes" is the important thing, but it's the result of using that particular ratio that is important, when you take a page of 1/2 the area by cutting across the long dimension, the aspect ratio is maintained. If you aren't worried about maintaining the aspect ratio for 1/2 pages, you can maintain any arbitrary aspect ratio as you scale…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.
To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
I'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.
If you really want an aesthetically appealing aspect ratio, wouldn't it be 1:(sqrt(5)+1)/2, which is even longer and narrower?
But then I dig deeper, and find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_page_construction , which seems to indicate that the ideal book page proportions are 2:3, which is again longer and narrower than 1:sqrt(2).
Personally, I find that US Letter is too wide for comfortable reading without using multiple columns of text, and printed manuals using the format are too floppy to be used without a stiff cover page or a binder. And that's just in print. I can't stand it when someone makes a PDF e-book with US Letter sized pages, because it doesn't fit onto any screen that I have without scaling or scrolling. My e-ink screen is 2:3. Most of my computers are 16:9. None of my 5:4 screens rotate to vertical, and that's as close as I can get to 7:9.
How does US Letter even have any fans at all?
Also, in my opinion, B8 seems ideal for playing cards. It is very close to the ID-1 standard, as well. B7 is the same size as ID-3, used for passports.
I'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.
I used to publish a magazine (in Japan) that was A4. Because of all the ads were sized to fractions of the page it was a big job to change the page size, so we just left it, for years. When I finally had the chance to make a new magazine I went for letter size -- it's a prettier proportion. As the other posters have said, A4 is too tall.
Is it my imagination or are magazines often taller than A4?
I enjoy working with paper. My favorite notebooks are ISO A4 size because they give me a bit more vertical room and still fit well in my backpacks. The issues that come up with regard to US Letter size paper seem to be: 1) It's not metric -- yes that's true, but A4 is 210mm x 297mm. These numbers seem completely arbitrary and don't take advantage of the metric system. I wish the US was on the metric system, but it's…
You write that the A4 numbers "seem completely arbitrary". While they might seem to be arbitrary, they are obviously not the least bit arbitrary. The base size A0 has an area of exactly 1 square meter. Each subsequent size is constructed by taking half of the previous, so for A4 it's 1/16th of a square meter, or 0.0625 sqare meters, 625 square centimeters, which is 21.0 cm x 27.9 cm (approximately). In order to have…
Which is still arbitrary :)