This is a very thorough explanation of what I consider a brilliant paper size standard. What genius to make the aspect ratio identical for each size, and to create smaller variants by cutting the larger one exactly in half.
There are two places where you can tell it's a bit dated though. The first is in declaring the TV aspect ratio as 4:3; it's just about universally 16:9 now. The second is the expectation that the U.S. would be converting to metric, that becomes less likely with every passing year.
The brilliance becomes obvious when you combine it with the envelope sizes. Mailing things in the US always ends with you having to awkwardly tri-fold papers and hope that you didn't botch it, so that the result will fit in your envelope of a non-standard size.
Meanwhile, anyone can fold an A4 perfectly in half and it will always fit perfectly in a C5 envelope. Paper can't be folded? Mail it in a C4 envelope instead. Think a C5 is too big? Get a C6 envelope and fold it twice.
All the parts fit perfectly into each other, and it's obvious how they fit. Any size paper can be mailed in any size envelope simply by folding it.
Right, it’s a great system! Concerning envelopes, here in Germany most mail I get is in DL envelopes, which also require the double fold. C5 is mostly used if double folding doesn’t work due to thickness.
> Mailing things in the US always ends with you having to awkwardly tri-fold papers and hope that you didn't botch it, so that the result will fit in your envelope of a non-standard size.
I live in Japan and the vast majority of mail is folded in thirds, just like it is in the US... Is using envelopes for paper folded just in half actually widespread in other countries?
After a vacation in, then, Czechoslovakia I received a letter from the police. The letter was artfully folded so that the text would overlap at 90 degrees (if viewed with a light source behind the folded letter). I always reckoned that was done to scramble the letter from unintended reading.
Normally the C3 or C4 envelopes used by government would be printed on the inside with a mass of letters, but in a way that matched with how the letter paper inside would be folded.
In Denmark you can get the envelopes that will fit an A4 folded in half easily, but I’ve see full A4 envelopes and those which require four foldes more often.
But postal mail is almost a thing of the past. I think the last two “letters” I recieved was a new credit card and the keycard with one-time code for my government issued digital login.
The vast majority of envelopes are the long ones where you have to fold three times and you never get it right (but are hzppy if it still fits into the enveloppe)
I'd argue that the International Standard Paper Sizes system is a case where a clever idea has been promoted beyond what is beneficial. There are a lot of use cases where the standard sizes are not optimal. I personally find the US Letter size handier than the A4, and 3x5 inch is vastly more convenient than A6 for index cards and pocket memo books. In Japan, most "B5" notebooks I see are actually considerably off standard in the measurements.
Japan's "B5" originated from the official paper size in Edo-Tokugawa era. So it has quite a bit of history, and IMO it's handier than ISO papers.
A fun fact is that "letter" size is pretty much hated in Asian countries. Since many poorly-internationalized softwares choose "letter" as the default printing size, while its usage is virtually zero there.
Yet in Japan there is a crazy number of different paper size and color, especially all the various slips used for bills and by the administration. The "post card bill" is also particularly annoying since once opened they don’t get flat again.
> The Legal format itself is quite rarely used, the notion that it is for “legal” work is a popular myth; the vast majority of U.S. legal documents are actually using the “Letter” format.
Can anyone confirm that this is really the case in the U.S.? In Canada at least, lawyers often use a paper size even longer than legal format. It makes photocopying a huge pain because the glass plate isn’t long enough on ordinary copiers, and these extra long sheets don’t fit in standard file cabinets without folding, and forget about using binders. Nobody uses these ridiculous extra long sheets except (Canadian) lawyers.
So looking around more, this is interesting - historically US lawyers did use legal size, but in 1983 the Supreme Court instituted a rule to move all federal paperwork to letter size, and most states followed shortly thereafter if they hadn't already transitioned.
>> The Legal format itself is quite rarely used, the notion that it is for “legal” work is a popular myth; the vast majority of U.S. legal documents are actually using the “Letter” format.
> Can anyone confirm that this is really the case in the U.S.?
I kinda randomly look at scans of trial court documents sometimes, and I don't think I've seen one that looked like it was printed on legal paper (but I've hardly been systematic and my sample has been minuscule).
However, all the printers at my office are stocked with legal size paper, and I sometimes would use it for printing diagrams were I needed a little more space to get everything to fit or tables that were a little wide (but not so wide that I needed to use tabloid paper). My mortgage statements from my bank legal size, as are my property tax notices.
My father was a lawyer and I was in his office a lot growing up. I'm pretty sure printed documents were always letter size, so they could fit in normal filing cabinets and folders.
Growing up the in the US the only place I ever saw legal-size paper was legal pads.
Not a lawyer, but have worked with lawyers in a law firm and government offices. Everywhere I worked did almost all legal work in letter format. I occasionally saw legal paper, but no more commonly than in non-law offices.
Digging around on the same page i stumbled into this which i think is a fun/interesting look at the history..though sounds like the ratio was in use even before its referenced here. Anyone know more about it?
"letter, written in 1786-10-25 by the physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (University of Göttingen, Germany, 1742–1799) to Johann Beckmann, seems to be the oldest preserved written reference to the idea of using the square-root of two as an aspect ratio for paper formats"
Excerpt of the English Translation -
"I once gave an exercise to a young Englishman, whom I taught in algebra, to find a sheet of paper for which all formats forma patens, folio, 4to, 8, 16, are similar to each other. Having found that ratio, I wanted to apply it to an available sheet of ordinary writing paper with scissors, but found with pleasure, that it already had it. It is the paper on which I write this letter, but to which, because since by cutting some of its original form may have been lost, I also add an uncut original. The short side of the rectangle must relate to the large one like 1 : √2, or like the side of a square to its diagonal.
This form has something pleasant and distinguished before the ordinary [form]. Are these rules given to the paper makers or has this form spread through tradition? Where does this form come from, which appears not to have emerged by accident?
Honoured wellborn forgive me this freedom."
> Based on the experience from the introduction of ISO paper formats in other industrialized countries at various points during the 20th century, it becomes clear that this process needs to be initiated by a political decision to move all government operation to the new paper format system. History shows that the commercial world then gradually and smoothly adopts the new government standard for office paper within about 10–15 years.
The article is obviously dated, but at this point that'd be such a waste of time and resources. Government has to be focused on digitization and paperless/electronic processes, ideally getting rid of photocopiers instead of upgrading them.
Had never heard the logic behind the ISO paper sizes before though, very cool!
One of the things I keep hearing from non-Americans is how dumb Americans are and then proceed to explaining the benefits of the metric system. I see this from random internet forums to Youtube comments, from news paper articles to talking to people in Europe. What people don't realize is that America is like a giant ship that has a ton of inertia to change. It is the world's largest economy with huge diversity of evolved shit that has piled up. It is difficult to clean it despite of the will. The US gov tried to convert America to the metric system unsuccessfully [1].
The US (NIST) in collaboration with international bodies lead the redefinition of SI units based on fundamental constants [2]. Furthermore, semiconductor industry, university labs, medical industry, etc. all use ISO standards and the metric system. The US semiconductor industry alone is larger than the GDP of Switzerland. I studied engineering in America and we used the metric system throughout with some problems in ANSI units for familiarization of the units - ultimately, the engineer needs to adapt to the company's unit system and not try to be a thorn.
I personally am tired of the rest of the world patronizingly explaining the advantages of the metric system to Americans - over and over. It is not that difficult of a concept and most technical people, engineers I know in the US already understand the benefits of the metric system. It is mildly annoying at best and condescending at worst. If we are in the unit system mess, there are a lot of things that still do not follow base-10 based units. For example, font type units (points) from Switzerland. Or the way we measure time. How come there aren't 10/100th units of a minute/hour commonly used around the world? A second is split into 1000 milliseconds but a minute is not split into 1000 seconds. Why this inconsistency? Why 360 degrees? If we didn't have 10 fingers, the entire decimal system is worse than base 12 or duodecimal system [3].
The problems faced by America are exactly the same type of problems if we want to convert the entire world to duodecimal system. It is next to impossible despite of clear advantages. Note that I am not defending the people that arrogantly want to stick to status quo - there are certainly people like that in the US.
Due to the US cultural influence over the world, the "outside world" often has to deal with Americans expressing distances, volumes, weights, temperatures etc in US units, especially in text. That is probably where the complaints comes from. You read something in a foreign language (English) that has become a lingua franca, and come across a unit expressed in what is not a lingua franca.
Perhaps the criticism is actually about US cultural dominance, which is highly benefitial to Americans.
If people say that Americans are stupid, I agree you have a right to be annoyed. But I hope people never stop to point out the merits of the metric system to Americans. That is a small price to pay for a cultural hegemony.
> That is probably where the complaints comes from. You read something in a foreign language (English) that has become a lingua franca, and come across a unit expressed in what is not a lingua franca.
I've only ever seen non-native speakers treat English as a lingua franca. Most native speakers I know view the ubiquity of English as fun trivia, and don't ascribe to the language the same type of importance that non-native speakers do. I remember once somebody posted open source code with non-English comments, and the people who were annoyed by that were almost exclusively non-native speakers.
Personally I see it as a form of gate-keeping. People who went out of their way to learn English as a second language want to continue using it for everything because then they have a leg up over their non-English speaking countrymen. The US on the other hand doesn't even have a de jure official language. Most government forms come in both English, Spanish, and whatever language happens to be common in the local area. A while ago I was getting census ads in three differently languages. In high school they told me I couldn't work at McDonald's unless I spoke Spanish.
It would be better for everyone if we just let go of the concept of "lingua franca" entirely.
> It would be better for everyone if we just let go of the concept of "lingua franca" entirely.
That is like saying we should just give up on the idea of understanding each other.
The reality is that cultures that come into contact need a language to understand each other. When there are more than 2 cultures coming into contact, the possibility of everyone just learning everyone else's language decreases dramatically.
For example, I work in a Romanian company and I have to work closely with US colleagues, German colleagues, Indian colleagues, Chinese colleagues, and Italian colleagues. In school, I learned English and French. If we didn't have a lingua franca that everyone is expected to know, I would have had to learn 4-5 more languages when I joined this company. I don't even know if my Chinese colleagues speak Mandarin or something else, or if they at least speak the same dialect. And of course, everyone of them would have also had to learn 4-5 new languages as well.
So unless you believe human beings can each easily learn ~20-30 languages (to pick some arbitrary low number), or unless you believe we should stop communicating across language boundaries, or hire translators, then we can't really let go of a lingua franca.
> I remember once somebody posted open source code with non-English comments, and the people who were annoyed by that were almost exclusively non-native speakers.
As a fun anecdote of my own, we recently implemented a clock feature in our app. During the demo, our US colleagues were confused why the clock feature was showing "16:23" instead of a normal hour.
My grandfather never had a formal education and I've seen old articles of his with citations in three different languages. That was in the early 1900s. In the early 2000s the majority of my high school classmates were trilingual and most of the world is already multilingual[0]. So I don't think 4-5 languages is a big difference from the current status quo.
Plus, you know, since it's a Romanian company you could all just learn Romanian in addition to the 2-3 languages you already know. Instead of only interacting with other cosmopolitans IT monkeys you could go interact with the locals and/or upper management for once. The local Romanian teenagers could get programming internships without having to learn English too. If fry-cooks can learn Spanish you can learn Romanian.
Who knows how many potential Linus Torvalds are out there working menial jobs in rural Finland because they failed English in high school.
I am Romanian, so I can speak it pretty well, and I am trilingual myself (though my French is pretty weak). The colleagues I was speaking of do not live in Romania though, and the Romanian company is just a subsidiary of a US company. All of the people I was speaking of live in their respective countries (the US, Germany, India, China, Italy). This is what I was getting at - if we have international trade and cooperation, we need a language to communicate across borders. Whether that is English or French or Mandarin is not the point, but that there must be 1 language that all of the people who want to participate in the conversation understand.
And while in work conditions some amount of multilingualism could be required, there are other venues like trade conferences where trying to handle people speaking tens or hundreds of languages would quickly become untenable for all but the greatest polyglot.
And Linus Torvalds is a great example. In a world without a lingua franca for IT, how could a Finnish student learn from and debate an American professor? Papers could be translated, but how would interactive discussion happen? Would Tannenbaum have learned Finnish or payed a Finnish translator if Torvalds hadn't known English?
> Or the way we measure time. How come there aren't 10/100th units of a minute/hour commonly used around the world?
Because metric time failed to catch on. The French Republic used metric time for several years, but Napoleon went back to customary time.
In metric time, there are 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. That means that one metric second is 0.864 seconds.
The calendar still has 12 months, but each month is exactly 30 days, with three 10-day weeks. There are five or six holidays at the end of the year, depending on whether it's a leap year.
The months have names based on the seasons. That's why events in French revolutionary history referred to by dates such as "the 18th of Brumaire" and "the 9th of Thermidor."
You're sure about the point measure being a Swiss invention? I thought it comes from Italian and French renaissance typographers like Aldus Manutius and Claude Garamond. Just saying because last time the topic of what the Swiss have and haven't invented came up, it ended in a media campaign claiming Swiss origin to cough lozenges (vs the Finnish). And there's of course the long-standing habit of misappropriating the cuckoo's clock origin to be Swiss, when it comes from the neighbouring Black Forest region in Germany (and actually has greatly contributed to the burning of said forest for glass production). /s
PS. No reasonable people think Americans are dumb for either the reasons you stated, or any others; that would be dumb in itself. However, strawmans like that make for an excellent "us-vs-them" political agenda narrative.
Duodecimal measurement units are overcomplicated if you don't also use a duodecimal number system, and converting anybody to that is a far bigger challenge than just changing unit systems. The digits "10" will now mean 12! So we'd better scrap Arabic numerals at the same time to avoid confusion.
Another thing is that a large portion of the "metric" world isn't fully metric, using old-fashioned units like miles and pyeong and tsubo. Really, the whole metric vs non-metric debate comes down to how much non-metric people see in their daily lives, not any binary distinction between "always use metric" and "never use metric" or anything of the sort.
Almost the entire world still uses nautical miles, knots (speed), and feet for aircraft altitude. I'm pretty sure most airplanes all use AN hydraulic fittings, which are based on Imperial sizes (correct me if I'm wrong there).
Also, people always say that the US is the only country that uses feet, pounds, miles, etc. But there are a lot of other countries that still use those units, or at least understand them, even if it's not an official unit. I even work with engineers from China who use and understand Imperial units. I also visited a friend in Ireland who had a (pre-digital) scale that measured weight in stones.
Living in France, general aviation is a bit of a mess.
- Light aircraft use nautical units.
- Ultralight use metric for speed and distance but feet for altitude and vertical speed
- Gliders use metric
- Charts use feet for altitude. Aviation authorities define airspace using nautical units but ground authorities use metric for things like fly over altitudes. All converted to feet in charts but the legal text use meters.
- AFAIK, mechanical parts for non-US built aircraft are metric. Pipe fittings have always been in inches for some reason, but commonly converted to metric (1/4in is written as 6.35mm).
I was just going to say this. Working in many countries (especially non-Western), I've found that even in countries that have been "metric" for generations, the traditional measurements still dominate in everyday use.
I'm going to go farther than you and say that US customary units are superior to metric in certain regards. A foot divided by three is 4 inches, a meter divided by three is 3.3333333333333333333333333 decimeters.
What annoys me is that the US gets singled out when the difference is one of degree, not kind. The UK still uses pints for beers, most countries still use their equivalent to feet in carpentry.
This comes up a lot but is it actually a valid argument at all?
In what real life situation would you want to divide 1 foot by 3 and get an integer as the result? If you're cutting materials, you usually want a given length, not 1/3 of whatever you happen to already have. So you're doing addition and subtraction, not division.
Also, it only works when you're simultaneously converting from feet to inches, and only when it's 1 foot! It's no use dividing 1 inch by 3, or 10 feet by 3 or almost any other length really. Though you could do a little maths to get 2 feet / 3 = 8 inches. But 4 feet / 3 isn't called 16 inches, it's 1 foot 4 inches which is pretty complicated to work out compared to ordinary decimal maths.
Not everyone calculates all the dimensions of what they're building in advance. Sure it's only convenient when you have integer feet divided by multiples of 2,3 or 4, but those are the first three primes so they're going to be common in a lot of operations. In which case the head math becomes:
4 feet divided by 3
= 4 * 4 inches
= 16 inches (It's perfectly reasonable to stop here, your tape measure isn't going only say 1'4")
= 16/12 feet + 16%12 inches
= 1'4"
vs.
4 meters divided by 3
= 4/3meters + ...
= 1meter + 4%3/0.3 decimeters
= 1.3meter + 4%0.3/0.03 centimeters
= 1.33meters ...
For each level of precision in metric you have to remember one additional digit, where as in the degenerate case for imperial you remember a constant number of digits at each step. Think of it as making multiples of the {1,1,2}th primes more convenient vs making the {1,3}th primes more convenient.
4 feet is very nearly 120cm, an equally likely (or approximate) measurement. A third of that is 40cm. Which was supposed to be easier?
30cm divides as well as 12in, and things that aren't nice numbers are easier to handle in cm or mm. Mark out every 4⅝ inches until you have a yard, then mark out every 12mm.
OK. I didn't realize that trick where you multiplied by 4 there. So it works when you're starting with any integer number of feet if you do a little multiplying.
But I still doubt this has any practical use. Can you give me a concrete example where you or anybody you know has done this? How common is it?
I want to build a shed, I approximate human height as 7 feet because it's a nice even number. I want some number of beams equally spaced nailed onto the posts, I choose 4 posts because 3 and 4 are numbers people default to. 4 beams mean 3 spaces, 7/3=7x4 = 28inches. I nail the beams on every 28 inches.
Can we agree that equally spacing 4 of something is a common operation? The metric example would be, 2 meters, divided by 3 = 0.333x2m = 0.666m But look at your tape measure and see which measurement is marked more promimently, an arbitrary centimeter precision measurement or an integer number of inches.
A foot divided by 10 is 1200thou. The nice thing about Imperial is that you can mix bases. And no, dividing by a multiple of 3 is not a "contrived example", it's literally the second prime. A multiple of 3 is by definition more common than a multiple of 10.
You know what also doesn't make sense? The SI Prefix system, where you have redundancies like "A thousand megawatts" instead of just saying "A billion watts". Most languages already have built in prefix systems. In fact, South and East Asian languages space theirs every 10^4 instead of 10^3, making SI prefixes a clusterfuck to use. That's in addition to the fact that the prefixes themselves are chosen haphazardly. The ordering of Micro, Nano, and Pico has no discernible pattern as most people simply know all three words to mean small. Abbreviations such as M, m, and μ, are easily mixed up.
Contrast that to thou and mil, which are easily remembered as abbreviations of thousandth and millionth. It's also easily extendable to an arbitrary precision.
IMO there is no question about metric system's usefulness especially because our counting system is in base-10. Metric system is tailored to that, whereas US ANSI system is tailored for base-12, which is the wrong base to work in.
Don't forget significant figures like your science teacher taught you. 841 mm has only 3, and both answers are correct to 3 sig. figs. So it's correct.
Another way to see it. What dimensions should it have for you to deem it correct?
It would be 840, not 841, if rounded down. Wikipedia says you should add 0.2 mm before rounding down (which gives you the expected 841), but it doesn't explain where that number comes from.
There are two places where you can tell it's a bit dated though. The first is in declaring the TV aspect ratio as 4:3; it's just about universally 16:9 now. The second is the expectation that the U.S. would be converting to metric, that becomes less likely with every passing year.