Paper Inconveniences

There was a lengthy Slashdot thread last Friday about metric paper sizes such as the A4 standard, it referring to a text that gives everything one might ever possibly want to know about international paper sizes.

I guess Americans aren’t much into folding things. Once one learns about the essential property of metric paper sizes—that when cut in half on the longer side of the piece of paper, one gets the next paper size down (i.e. an A4 piece of paper cut in half becomes two A5 notepad-sized sheets of paper), thanks to the longer side being the square root of two times the length of the shorter side, one starts finding the U.S. letter-sized 8 1/2×11 inch to be annoyingly inconvenient. According to the above site, this was an arbitrary choice of paper size, apparently “just a commercial compromise at the time [1921] to reduce inventory requirements without requiring significant changes to existing production equipment.”

The U.S. letter size also seems difficult to work with in terms of laying out text aesthetically on a sheet of paper. Alas A4 paper is hard to find in this country. Maybe it’s time to special-order some.