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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).

Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:

The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram

[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]

ISO 216 A series papers formats

AO

A1

A3

A5

A7

A6

Et.

A4

Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.

Source: Financial Times

  • puchaczyk
    144·
    6 months ago

    Aside from the 1 to √2 ratio, the area of A0 paper is exactly 1m². People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting.

    • Turun@feddit.de
      91·
      6 months ago

      Which is awesome, because every number up halves the size. This, combined with the standard way that paper weights are given (e g. 80g/m2) allows you to easily calculate how much a piece of paper weights: 1 A4 80g/m2 weighs 5g (1/2^4 * 80g)

      • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        6 months ago

        Well, Germans are pretty anal about standards (thankfully) and they do them right, so why not copy them?

        • onion@feddit.de
          3·
          6 months ago

          The world would be a better place if we copied good things more often.

          Imagine all of Europe copied Dutch transportation-, German prostitution- and Portugese drug-policies

        • bort@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          6 months ago

          so why not copy them?

          oh, I totally agree with you.

          In fact standards are made to be copied. That’s like the entire point of them.

    • 100_kg_90_de_belin @feddit.it
      7·
      6 months ago

      From their website: “We’re ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. We develop and publish International Standards.”

      • uis@lemm.ee
        24·
        6 months ago

        Sadly, ISO in recent decade started to do bullshit. They don’t pay for standard development, they don’t employ anyone for standard development, they collect membership fees from national standards organizations, require payment to download most standards and don’t allow to copy published standards. Also they retroactively paywalled a lot of standards.