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."

Comments

Re:Side-by-sideness

[Golias]

Wow. That will really come in handy when I want to expand my thesis to poster size.

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.