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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

  • 1rre
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    28 days ago

    Just use multiple pages if needed?

    Who needs all their words on a single huge page like some sort of scroll?

    • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      28 days ago

      It takes less paper to print 1 page of legal if that’s what your text fits on than it does 2 pages of normal paper if said text doesn’t take up all of the second piece of paper.

      When you’re printing large documents (10 or more pages let’s say) that starts to be significant savings in thickness of a stack, too.

      It’s not one huge page, it’s an extra 2 inches, or ~25% longer