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Comment by Modified3019

21 hours ago

We (normal citizens, businesses, government) mostly use “Letter” size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size) which is slightly shorter than A4

Apparently the reagan admin is responsible for making this our official government document size, and no one knows exactly why this size was chosen.

9 comments

Modified3019

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13hours  21 hours ago

Like most of your standards. No-one knows why, but it's obviously advantageous to defend it religiously as "better than everyone else"

  • lukas099  21 hours ago

    > it's obviously advantageous to defend it religiously as "better than everyone else

    Or laugh at ourselves about it, which is what we normally do.

  • MBCook  21 hours ago

    At a certain point things get so engrained the cost to switch would be huge and the benefits don’t (seem to) outweigh it.

    I think switching to metric would make far more sense than this.

    • XorNot  20 hours ago

      I don't know in terms of saved paper because the printer has somehow switched to Letter again I think an argument could be made...

  • spiderice  20 hours ago

    I'm sorry our paper size offends you. Had we have known it would cause such an inferiority complex we never would have done it.

SllX  21 hours ago

That Wikipedia article was lacking citations so I dug some up with ChatGPT: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CPUB-101spub9/pdf/GP...

On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.

I also found this article from Time from January 15th 1979 that this was actually slightly cheaper despite using more paper: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0%2C33009%2...

The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.

> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."

Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:

> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120220192919/http://www.afandp...