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The Logic Behind Metric Paper Sizes
Oily Pakora writes "Those of us in the United States are so used to our Letter and Legal paper sizes. We've seen the A4 paper size option in our printer trays and in printer preference menus. Metric sizes used almost everywhere in the world, save for the US and Canada. Here is an interesting article that discusses all of the aspects of metric paper. For those who enjoy a bit of math, did you know that in the Metric paper system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of 2? This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."
That's great logic: change what works. Seriously, I don't see what metric paper sizes can do that A, B, C, D, and E size sheets can't. Leave it to Europeans to spend more time fussing over the paper itself, rather than putting something useful on the paper.
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Oh wait. That will never happen.
Standard sizes are built around the real-world needs of the printing business. "Gutter" space is very helpful to book binding shops. It sounds like the metric choice is built around an obsessive-compulsive person's mad desire to make everything "match up" just right, so the same irregular number is used for the ratio of all paper (as if that somehow makes things easier... wouldn't it have been much nicer to make the ratio a nice, round 1.5?) regardless of how the paper size in question is going to be commonly used. No surprise there, though. The entire metric system is built around careful and pedantic synchronization of all quantities with an incorrect measurement of the Earth done by a couple of sloppy Frenchmen working for Napoleon.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's not a rectangle? Wow!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Or maybe what made our country great in so many ways was our willingness to thumb our noses at Europe. Why alter what's working so well?