• thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Oh, let’s also remember that A4 is a member of beautiful variant of an “SI system for paper”. Want a paper the size of an A4 folded double? We have A85. Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.

    • Statement: “I want a piece of paper that I can fold twice to get exactly a US letter size.”
    • Response: “You must be crazy.”

    Edit: Did a fat-fingering

    • f314@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      What on earth are you on about with those numbers? 😅

      A0 is the base size, with an area of one square meter. Fold that in half and you get A1. Fold that in half and you get A2, and so on. Regular printer paper is A4. You’ll rarely, if ever, see sizes smaller than A6.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I fat-fingered the A5, otherwise the numbers were right?

        I’m aware how the system works, I just wrote about it using A4 as the “base”. A3 is what you fold to get A4, A2 folds to give A3, etc.

        I didn’t know A0 was exactly 1m2 though, TIL!

        • f314@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.

          This made it sound like you meant that folding an A3 sheet twice gives A2 😅 Might just be my reading comprehension, though!

          • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            Nah, your reading comprehension is just fine, I just worded myself in a pretty verbal way. I totally get how it could be misread, I was thinking along the “salesman making a pitch” line:

            “Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. Want an extra fold before you get there? We have A2!”

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      american sizes do the same thing, just only five steps in ANSI sizes, and not really that well known outside of the industries that use the paper sizes, such as printing shops.

      smallest being u.s. letter (A4 equivalent) is “ANSI A”, 8.5x11in…

      largest being the full sheet (A0 equivalent) is “ANSI E”, 34x44in…

      with the expected three steps between for B, C, and D.

      going smaller than u.s. letter and ANSI A… letter halved (4.25x5.5in) ‘half letter’ is a common notepad and post card size; and halved again (2.12x2.75in) is a common label size.

    • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days ago

      The aspect ratio of the A series of paper is √2, so every doubling or halving of the size retains the same aspect ratio. If you want to save paper and print at half size, you can just do that and it works flawlessly. However doing it this way means very unmemorable decimal unit dimensions.

      Half letter and tabloid are much taller than letter so you have to either have overly large margins on the top and bottom, or you have to reformat your document if you ever want to change the sizes.

      Though specialty paper suppliers do sell 22x17 paper if you really want to double fold to get letter paper. 11x17 is twice the width of letter which works for printing bifold books in letter size. Its just the scaling aspect ratio thing. Sizes in multiples for bookmaking do exist in both systems.