📄 rule
::: spoiler alt-text 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. :::
Wait, the US genuinely doesn't use A4 etc.?
We have trouble fitting all our freedom on your kooky, internationally-recognized sizes
Here’s a comparison using the most sensible units possible:
Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that's dumb, we should switch.
I’m British and you are not alone, worse still, I spent a year in the USA and never even noticed.
Also, I'm pretty sure A4 runs through an American printer just fine.
Most printers support a variety of paper sizes
They jam less
Letter paper (8.5" x 11" | 215.9mm x 279.4mm) is kinda sorta pretty close to A4 (8.27" x 11.69" | 210mm x 297mm) so without having the two next to each other, it can seem like A4 is just a funny piece of letter, and vice versa. But to answer the actual question, USA and Canada (and apparently the phillipines???) use the "North American Standard" which is a terrifying mess in comparison to the beauty that is the ISO standard.
Edit: typos
Philippines makes sense, being a former US colony
The US is a former British colony, but it doesn't stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. Utter lunatics...
I'm sorry, I still haven't forgiven them for the whole tea thing...
We wanted to make sure it was as salty as King George III.
America tried to modernise many British means of methods and standards. They used a metric currency long before Britain. That’s why they have a cent (1/100) rather than pennies and bobs and truppence.
They got ride of many terms for multiples of measurements that made the imperial system more similar to metric. Americans use ounces, but they don’t use pounds.
America also defines their us customary units using metric. There’s no longer an inch. There is a meter and from that an inch is defined as 24 millimeters. This is largely due to British, Canadian and American components for fighting wars not fitting together despite all using the same inch.
Had America modernised a little later they probably would have converted to metric earlier than Britain.
Tbf, I can see the use case for some "non-standard" sizes, like Legal, where having more height to the page without the extra width might be useful for readability of long documents.
...can't think of an excuse for the rest, though.
That's how it starts, you see the usefulness of one case, the next thing you know is you're measuring distance in sheep and power in mice
Hamsters, not mice. Get it right.
And always fractional, so, to convert from Farenheit to Celsius (inferior to kelvin, though), you take farenheit, add 57 mice, and divide by a hamburger.
As a European, I do appreciate Legal as a format.
It just happens slightly too often that an A4 is not long enough and the last bit, including the signature, goes to the next page.
I wish Legal was common here. Or perhaps we could get a Long A4 with a third extra height or so.
The Letter format should just be replaced by A4 though.
As a European, haven't you heard about the existence of the B and C series of paper sizes? It may not be exactly what you have in mind, but B4 paper is 250 x 353 mm (9.8 x 13.9 in) and C4 paper is 229 x 324 mm (9 x 12.8 in). There's also elongated A which is really long.
I hope you appreciate the irony of an American telling you about them.
There's also scrolls, if Elongated A isn't quite enough.
Tried these but my printer always gets caught on the wooden handle things 😜🤪
Time to update to a fax machine then!
https://www.possupply.com/other-pos-supplies-accessories/fax-paper-rolls-ribbons
I do miss the continuous form paper used with dot matrix printers.
It made banners easy, and I could make snakes out of the edges.
Burn the unbeliever!
As your links explain, C series is used for envelopes, while B and elongated A are special case that aren't commonly used.
In any case, none of those series has an equivalent to American Letter.
The only paper that you will commonly find in European offices are A4 and (to a lesser extent) A3.
A big office printer might have 4 trays stocked with A4 and one tray with A3, for example.
I think Mexico too, or at least the paper name is "carta" and "oficio" which would translate to letter and legal (kinda)
Do you have a moment to talk about 8.5 x 11?
Make it quick there's an important call coming in about my auto warranty
Just ask them to fax you
Their hole puncher has three holes and binders/folders have 3 rings as well
How many have yours got? More or fewer?
I have seen legal/letter sized clipboard with two rings, for the short end of the paper.
Either two or four. The two holes are kinda in the middle then if it's four holes it's those same two plus two more closer to the edge
And for 4, the spacing between them is the same as for the 2, leaving you 3 equal spaces.
And then there is Sweden...
YouTube content opportunity ❕
Comparison of US, EU, & Swedish hole punched paper. Which flips smoothest? Which is most tear resistant? Which tears most gracefully?
When have you ever seen a content gap on YouTube…
6-9 holes? Is that where Swedes keep their meatballs
Filofax If from UK. For these organisers and notebooks they produce, imho it actually makes sense to have several (equally spaced) holes.
Swedish Triohålning and especially the corresponding binders however, are mildly speaking impractical: It works starting from ISO A6 instead A7 and reading documents in a trio binder is a mess.
TIL
Also, if you fold a sheet in half, both sets of two match, so if you cut 4 hole punched A4's in half, they'll fit in two hole binders.
2, 4 or 23.
No, we mostly use Letter, Legal, etc. When you use photoshop to print, you would pick letter or legal usually.
https://goodcalculators.com/paper-size-conversion-calculator/
11x17 is incredibly common too. Usually it is oriented landscape and z folded to get a large diagram into a document. It's kind of irritating that the most typical large format size is 24x36, which is a different aspect ratio than 11x17, for a variety of reasons. If you're designing something you need to know what aspect ratio to design for. Most copiers can do 11x17, and if the standard large format size was 22x34 it would be exceedingly easy for most offices to produce good working copies of large documents. Best compromise I've seen is when people put a logo or header on the side that can be omitted when you switch aspect ratios.