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A Love of A4 Paper
By Grey | June 23, 2008
While English ideas about office supplies are often abominations in the eyes of God, one thing they did get right is their paper. Rather than using the arbitrary letter, ledger, legal and tabloid paper sizes as the United States does, England uses something called the A-series of paper.
A-series paper is mathematically beautiful and delightfully useful. The basic rule for A-series is if you take the height of a page and divide it by the width of the page the result will equal the square root of two.
The most used paper size is A4: it’s 21.0cm wide and 29.7cm tall. If you take out your calculators you’ll see that 29.7 divided by 21 is indeed 1.414, the square root of two. Why bother with this ratio? Because it allows convenient scaling of documents.
If you take an A4 page and cut it in half on the long end, you get two sheets of A5 paper. If you take two pieces of A4 and join them together on their long ends, you get a sheet of A3.
The beautiful thing about this system is documents can be scaled up and down very easily and without wasting margin space. For example, if you write a book and want to reproduce pages from a journal article, you can fit two pages of the article exactly on one page of A4 without any wasted margin space.
The other advantage of A4 paper is an aesthetic one. When working with paper, you want more length, rather than width. It’s easier to read shorter lines (that’s why newspapers have columns) than longer lines. A4 is just slightly narrower than US letter paper, but also slightly longer. More length is what you want out of paper. Just as with computer monitors, it’s increased length that makes usage more comfortable, not width.
If only the United States was not saddled with the terrible legacy problem of trying to switch from the old, arbitrary system to the more improved European version.
Topics: Office Supply Fetish |
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:07 am
Just a quick note: the A* paper size was created in Germany (see Wikipedia) and is now an ISO standard used all over the world except (of course…) in USA and Canada.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Well… paper usage is not the only thing the UK is starting to do right. Slowly but surely, the UK is transitioning towards the International System of Units (the metric system). For those who study science do realize the beauty of the system and why ALL countries in the world use it (or are starting to) except Liberia, Myanmar and the USA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
July 8th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I’ve always liked the A5 size, especially for portable systems. It’s large enough to be able to write plenty of stuff on but small enough that you can carry it around fairly easily.