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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

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Tbf, I can see the use case for some “non-standard” sizes, like Legal, where having more height to the page without the extra width might be useful for readability of long documents.

    …can’t think of an excuse for the rest, though.

    • lad@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      That’s how it starts, you see the usefulness of one case, the next thing you know is you’re measuring distance in sheep and power in mice

        • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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          5 months ago

          And always fractional, so, to convert from Farenheit to Celsius (inferior to kelvin, though), you take farenheit, add 57 mice, and divide by a hamburger.

    • alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      As a European, I do appreciate Legal as a format.

      It just happens slightly too often that an A4 is not long enough and the last bit, including the signature, goes to the next page.

      I wish Legal was common here. Or perhaps we could get a Long A4 with a third extra height or so.

      The Letter format should just be replaced by A4 though.