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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

  • Yamayo@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 months ago

    Let’s check. I grabbed four random German books from my bookshelf. If you’re right, the pages should either be roughly 30cm×21cm (A4) or 15cm×10.5cm (A5).

    Book 1: 18cm × 11.5; book 2: 19cm×12.5cm; book 3: 20.5cm × 12.5cm; book 4: 24cm × 17cm. None of those conform to the standard.

    A5 is not 15x10,5

    If A4 is 291x210 then OBVIOUSLY the next one starts with 210: 210x148.

    • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      You’re right. Sorry for getting my post-7pm arithmetic skills on you. However, my point still stands. ‘Close’ is not ‘conforming’ to the standard.

      • Yamayo@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 months ago

        Close to your non standard book measurements. I really appreciate the usefulness of ISO 216, witch is actually a standard.