Comment by madcaptenor
3 days ago
As an American I have done this with 8.5 x 11 "letter" paper. I wonder if there's some way one can take advantage of the special properties of A[n] paper.
3 days ago
As an American I have done this with 8.5 x 11 "letter" paper. I wonder if there's some way one can take advantage of the special properties of A[n] paper.
1000% yes! An 8.5x11" paper is effectively a 12" ruler accurate to 2 decimal places.
Fold an 8.5" into a square (right triangle) and the long edge is exactly 12.02"
Fold that in half and you can measure 6.01", and 3.005" (exactly). You get 1.5" for free, and can fairly accurately get exactly 1" by rolling the other 3" side into thirds.
If you want to get an exact 1", you can technically get there via 11"-8.5"-1.5", and that gives you the full imperial (fractional) measurement basis, all from folding a (presumably accurate) 8.5x11" piece of paper.
As a long time European I never thought I’d come to see the sense of American ways, but having lived here now for a couple of years, it actually is easier for it to just be straight up 8.5 x 11 rather that a ratio that includes a square root.
It's an interesting tiny trade-off.
Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.
Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.
Many, many people want to double or halve documents.
Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.
I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).
I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.
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You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.
Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.
Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.
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I've been working with paper sizes a lot for the last year, and I've rarely thought about the square root of two ratio and when I've, it has been just to amuse myself. However, knowing that to get an A5 piece of paper I just need to cut/fold in half an A4, and that I can get to A3 and A2 by adding A4s, has been really useful. If I were in USA, didn't have that, and instead would have to install yet another new size system in my head[^1], I would despair.
[^1]: This is fun! https://papersizes.io/us/
What bothers me mostly about American papersizes (I’m also a European immigrant) is that the ratio is not consistent between sizes. So if I design a poster, but want a couple of letter sized printouts for some reason, I have to create a whole new design, rather then just shrink everything down. Otherwise the margins get all wonky.
One nice thing with Letter size is you can fit 80 columns of 10 dpi text with standard LaserJet margins. With A4 you have to squeeze the characters together slightly to make that fit.
A[n] sizes are useful when enlarging or shrinking documents. Enlarge or shrink by muliples of sqrt(2) and there's always a fitting paper size available. Or you can put two A5s together on an A4, or two A4s on an A3.
> I wonder if there's some way one can take advantage of the special properties of A[n] paper.
Not as a consumer. As a paper producer, you take advantage of it by cutting large sheets of paper in half to produce smaller sheets. Since you never sell any sizes that aren't clean multiples of each other like this, you've minimized the amount of paper you waste. That's the "advantage".
This was once the standard way of making paper; I don't know if it still is.
As a consumer I used to use it all the time, though it matters a lot less these days. Two A4 pages at 50% zoom (A5) fit on one A4. You could cut your printing cost for drafts in half by doing that, back when we had to actually print to check the layout. Same went for posters etc, and since the aspect ratio was preserved it was really handy to preview at home on A4 sheet before taking it to the print shop.
I’m sure you can do that on other size systems, but ISO paper sizing gives you accurate scaling.
Same goes for photocopies, photocopiers can scale copies so two A4 sheets copy to one, if you don’t need the same size.
> Two A4 pages at 50% zoom (A5) fit on one A4.
This assumes there are no errors anywhere in the sizes or alignments of the A4 base page or either A5. Otherwise, you'll have an A5 running over an edge of the A4 or both A5s overlapping in the middle.
If your pages are designed with margins on the assumption that errors in the paper are common, this issue disappears because the margins cover for it. But still, if I wanted to do a display of two 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper, I'd want a board that was bigger than 17" x 11".
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