just learned americans have different standard paper sizes than everyone else. what do you MEAN you don’t have A4 as the standard. what do you mean your standard paper size isn’t even the same size as an A4. apparently it’s like. ’letter’ and ’legal’ and whatever else. help!!!
this is so scary
That has to be false. That's misinformation hold on
holy fucking shit
So I work in engineering; and always wondered who used these weird “A” sizes I’d see in large printer settings that I’ve never seen any company even have paper in stock for. Now I know.
And now I have to be one of those obnoxious US Americans because WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE THESE WEIRD UNEVEN DIMENSIONS!? Even in metric most of the “A” settings are an annoying ratio! 210x297mm? 594x841mm!? What’s the point of using such small units of measurement if you’re not going to make sensible sizes!?
because the largest standard paper size is A0 which is exactly one square metre of paper with an aspect ratio of the square root of two. this gives us a nice simple measurement of area for the paper as well as allows us to do the halving/doubling magic. A1 is 0.5m², A2 is 0.25m² etc.
The halving/doubling magic that psychaun refers to is the fact that you can get each paper in the series by cutting the previous one in half. I fold some A4 paper in half, I have an A5 booklet. I tape two A4 pieces together along their long side, I have an A3 piece. Each piece of paper is half the area of the previous and half the width of the previous' length with a length the same as the previous' width. The aspect ratio is exactly the same for every size. This makes it very easy to resize things, fold things inside each other, and calculate the size of paper you've never used before based on its name. "I can resize this to fit any other paper size because the aspect ratio is identical," "I can fold a standard size in half to get the next standard size down" and "the area I'm working with can be multiplied up to fit into a metre squared without any messy fractions of leftover paper" are all far more practical considerations for a paper size than "the millimetre length of this paper size isn't a round number".
fyi there are also B sizes in paper, which fit in between the A sizes - less often used but good for book covers and stuff
a Bn size is the mean between An and An-1
and then C sizes for envelopes, such that a C4 envelope fits an unfolded sheet of A4 etc
Reblogging because this is something I find interesting.
Also because it’s another example of how the United States has to do things differently—to its detriment.
This is a bad take, friend.
The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.
The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."
The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.
American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."
No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.
tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.
*While many Mesoamerican countries have officially adopted ISO standards, ANSI standard paper is most commonly in use day to day.
#ok sure sure but like
#you could use the same reasons to justify the us still using standard instead of metric #which is stupid and counterproductive as hell #I don't think anyone seriously believes the us just does things their own special way for it's own sake
#however they do double down on doing it their way even when there are other (arguably better) ways
#out of weird american exceptionalism #so I think that people getting frustrated and saying that America just insists on doing things in dumb ways #is a shorthand for all of that
THOSE ARE THE SAME! FUCKING!! REASONS!!! WE DON'T (FULLY, MANDATORILY) USE METRIC
Holy fucking shit. People could literally spend 30 seconds looking this up instead of repeating "bluh bluh bluh America dumb"
The U.S. does not use the metric system due to high conversion costs, inertia, resistance, and historical reluctance.
The US has actually used a hybrid of metric and Imperial for decades, with changeover occurring where it's both necessary and economically viable, and has not fully switched over because of the prohibitive cost and ingrained habits. Literally trillions of dollars worth of equipment, road signs, documentation, like... I genuinely think y'all don't have any concept of how fucking big this country is, or how much this shit costs to change.
Let's take one single easy thing. Ready? Speed limit signs. How much would it cost just to change the speed limit signs, very very approximately?
Okay. So. To keep ourselves from going fully insane, let's limit this question only to interstates. This is the network of federally-managed roads which, you know, goes from state to state. There are 48,890 miles (sorry! 78,680 km, but I'm still mostly calculating in miles, because it's easier to find numbers this way) of interstate roadway in the US.
There are between 1 and 4 speed limit signs per mile, depending on traffic density. For simplicity, let's say 2 per mile.
It costs about $400 per sign to replace a speed limit sign. This is just speed limit signs. We'll get to other signs in a minute.
So that's $39.11 million dollars just for the speed limit signs. But hold on! You can't even get to replacing exit signs until you replace mile marker signs! Those are approximately every 1/10th to 2/10 of a mile, again on average, bc you don't want someone to have to walk very far to look for a mile marker if they've been in an accident. Let's go with every 2/10 of a mile. It costs $200 to remove a sign and $550 to place a new one, bc you have to get surveyors out to measure them and place them properly.
So let's see, that's 244,450 signs removed... $48.89 million... and then let's say we're placing kilometer markers every half kilometer just to make it nice and even, okay? 157,360 new half-kilometer markers at $550 each. $86.5 million.
So we're already spending about $174.5 million dollars, about $15 million more — on just replacing those two kinds of road signs just on interstates, which are a tiny fraction of the actual number of miles of state or federally-managed roads — than it costs the Federal Housing Authority to oversee the processing of every mortgage in the US for a year, just to pull a random line item out of the 2026 budget. We haven't touched any of the other signs on those or any other roads, let alone literally anything else.
And for what, exactly? Why? Because it fucking bugs people who don't live here? What is the purpose of spending a bunch of fucking money to change our shit up and just confuse people who think in miles?
We use metric when it both makes sense and is financially feasible to switch. My medication is measured in metric. A lot of precise machinery is measured in metric, especially new things that were created or invented in the last few decades or are used in scientific fields. Grandma's recipes and the roads and our paper are done the way that works for us in our big weird country that is actually 50 smaller and extremely proud little countries wrestling for elbow room in a giant lumpy trenchcoat, and it's not hurting you, so you don't have to be a dick about it.
I would recommend people listen to the 99% Invisible episode about screw threads in order to understand why standardizing something a vast industry already uses is really fucking hard.
Also: from a Canadian, fuck you all very much. Stop pissing on the USA because when you do that you also piss on Canada AND Mexico.
« What?? But I thought Canada and Mexico uses metric???? » we trade so much fucking industrial stuff with the USA that we have to use a mix, okay?!
Stuff like road signs, which is under our jurisdiction, we use metric. Stuff like construction material, which we trade back and forth, we use imperial units. And literally not a fucking one of us find that a problem. Things do not explode and houses do not crumble on a daily basis because we have to do a bit of unit conversion, and retrofitting US factories to new standards would mean fucking up the industrial setup of literally everybody else who trades with them
