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Harry Simenon
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Post Number: 1656
Registered: 10-2003

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Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007 - 04:49 am:

Ever wondered why some layouts look funny when you print them?

The layout might have been designed for A4 instead US letter.

http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

"Ever downloaded a document or received a file from a friend only to have it print out badly? There are lots of potential causes of such problems: different typefaces available to the creator and the printer; different operating systems and different versions of the same operating systems exposing limitations in supposedly cross-platform standards; different printer engines, especially when crossing between ink-jet and laser; and so on.

An oft-overlooked cause of problems, however, is different paper sizes. When people in the US and Canada reach for a sheet of paper to write or print on, chances are they reach for a piece of Letter-sized paper (also known as US Letter), measuring 8.5? by 11?. With few exceptions, when people everywhere else reach for a sheet of paper to write or print on, they reach for a piece of A4-sized paper, measuring 210mm by 297mm.

A quick conversion between inches and millimetres shows the two sizes aren’t all that different:

Millimetres Inches

Width Length Width Length
A4 210.0 297.0 8.26 11.69
Letter 215.9 279.4 8.50 11.00

Which raises the question, why the difference at all? If both sizes are arbitrary, why bother with maintaining a difference. The answers are long and involved, and mostly outside the scope of this article. At the core, however, it comes down to one thing: A4 isn’t an arbitrary size.

A4 Described
A4 is part of the ISO 216-series of related paper sizes known more commonly as the A-series. This series starts with the large A0 sheet and a quick look at this large sheet of paper shows why these various sheets are the sizes they are.

A0 sheets of paper are 841mm by 1189mm. Again, apparently arbitrary. Multiply the two numbers together, however, and it becomes a little clearer: 841 * 1189 = 999,949mm squared or 0.999949m squared (ie just a smidgen under a square metre of paper). For all practical purposes, an A0 sheet contains a square metre of paper.

So why not make it a 1m by 1m sheet? Because of another non-arbitrary consideration: the aspect ratio or relationship between the height and width of each sheet.

1189/841 = 1.413793103448276, not particularly memorable, unless you happen to be maths-geeky enough to see the similarity between it and ?2 (the square-root of 2, an irrational number which starts thus: 1.414213562373095) Round both numbers to four significant figures and you get the same value: 1.414.

So, the aspect ratio of an A0 sheet of paper is, again for practical purposes, one as to the square-root of two or 1:?2. And again, I hear the cries: ‘so what!’

A ratio of 1:?2 is more than a mathematical oddity. It doesn’t have a nifty name, like the famous Golden Ratio or Golden Mean. It does, however, have a nifty property. Divide a rectangle with sides 1:?2 along the longest side and the smaller rectangle you create has the same aspect ratio. (Markus Kuhn suggested in correspondence we call the ratio the Lichtenberg Ratio, after Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the German enlightenment figure who first proposed the ratio as a basis for paper formats in 1786.)
Any sheet of A-series paper is as long as the next-larger sheet is wide and half as wide as the next-larger sheet is long."

"And the sheer utility of this interchangability is why I believe older paper sizes such as US Letter will eventually disappear, even in the US. For example, the current version of the ANSI standard noted above — ANSI/ASME Y14.1m-1995 — recognises the older paper sizes for legacy purposes only, setting A-series paper as the preferred US standard for technical drawings.

Moreover, I understand A-series paper — especially A4 — is slowly becoming the norm in US colleges and universities, if for no other reason than making it easier for students and staff to photocopy articles from (inevitably A4-sized) journals."

Will your grandchildren stuff A4 in their printers you think?

Tom Elkins
Wisdom Member
Post Number: 831
Registered: 01-2005

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Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007 - 05:23 am:

I can't believe I read that whole thing.

Tom Elkins
NORTH of TEXAS
www.authorsden.com/tomelkins

Harry Simenon
Unity Member
Post Number: 1657
Registered: 10-2003

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Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007 - 12:26 pm:

Did you read the whole thing? I didn't.

Todd Hunter
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Post Number: 3663
Registered: 02-2003

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Posted on Sunday, August 26, 2007 - 03:36 pm:

I skimmed...

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Stephen Lodge
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Post Number: 578
Registered: 06-2004

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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 04:44 am:

I never had that problem ~

http://www.stephenlodge.com
Novels by Stephen Lodge:
"Charley Sunday's Texas Outfit!"
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Harry Simenon
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Post Number: 1658
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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 09:16 am:

I do bump into it occasionally, when printing anything Canadian or US.

But do you believe the US will ever switch to A4?

Gloria Marlow
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Post Number: 2020
Registered: 04-2002

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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 09:51 am:

Do you know how long "they" have been trying to get us to convert solely to the metric system? When I was in 8th grade 26 years ago, the teachers insisted we needed to learn the metric system because the time was near when that would be the only thing we would be able to use. That still hasn't come to pass. Yes, we use it a bit more than then, but not to the extent they thought we would by now. Thank goodness since I never did quite get it.

Gloria
www.gloriamarlow.com
Flowers for Megan**Shades of Silence**The Butterfly Game

Harry Simenon
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Post Number: 1659
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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 10:56 am:

Metric is much easyer from my point of view ofcourse...
It all works in decades: 1 meter is 10 decimeter is 100 centimeters is 1000 Millimeters.
I'm 1.75 meters tall/short, or 175 centimeters. (an inch is 2.54 cm.)

But I think you don't need to worry about the metric system for several decades more Gloria, if ever.

Gloria Marlow
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Post Number: 2021
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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 11:55 am:

Well, I suppose I got that part...how many decimeters in a meter, etc. I can keep that all together to an extent.

What I didn't get was converting everything over to metric. I know that a liter and a gallon are comparable in some way, and a kilometer and a mile are comparable and as you say an inch and a centimeter, but when trying to convert it all over from one to the other, I am lost.

Gloria
www.gloriamarlow.com
Flowers for Megan**Shades of Silence**The Butterfly Game

Kevin R. Paglia
Hsympothai Member
Post Number: 316
Registered: 07-2003

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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 12:01 pm:

Does that count as one of the books I read for the month?

Kevin

Tom Elkins
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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 01:50 pm:

Gloria -

"They" (our intellectuals and politicians) wanted to make the switch wholesale so we would think in metrics. After that it isn't necessary to convert, and metrics really are much simpler. Also, they are used by Europe and most of the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, we are a stubborn lot. A meter is about 39 inches (1.1 yards). A kilometer is only .625 of a mile, or thereabouts. A liter is close to a quart, but not not quite. To use it in our everyday lives, we would need to ditch the old system completely, which most of the rest of the world has already done. Well now, we're not going to let them ram that down our throats, are we?

Tom Elkins
NORTH of TEXAS
www.authorsden.com/tomelkins

Harry Simenon
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Post Number: 1660
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Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 01:57 pm:

Gloria, except for the inch I need to look up the rest as well, as I keep forgetting the conversion factors.

This will help:
http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi

1 gallon = 1.38 liter, and a mile is 1.6 kilometer.

Except for the scandinavian mile, that is 10 kilometer.
I found that out the hard way when backpacking in Sweden. We asked directions, and the guy said it was about two miles. We thought that he thought we were americans (we didn't speak swedish), and thought it would be a bit over 3 kilometers.
Those were the longest two miles (12 US miles) I ever walked.

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Posted on Monday, April 14, 2008 - 07:38 am:

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Posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 - 03:19 am:

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