Paper trail

Been a while and I suppose it's time to resume with the complaints. So what does all this talk about powers of two and the metric system and the stupidity of the inch lead us to? Why, praise for the most logical of paper sizes devised by man of course. I speak of the A (and B and C) standard system of paper used in many parts of the world, particularly Europe. But not here in the US of course. We have this strange system of paper sizes like letter, legal, etc, and just as notoriously, photo sizes. But before I get into that, perhaps some of you may wonder what's so wonderful about things like A4 paper?




Well the genious of this paper is that the length is square-root of 2 times the width. And what this means is that if you cut the paper exactly in half width-wise or put 2 sheets together width-wise you get a new sheet that has the exact same ratio of length to width. And of course what THIS means is that you can go to a photo copier and shrink the image to, say, 70.7% and you can fit 2 sheets side by side exactly with no extra white (or black) margin space. It also means that you represent an entire poster size (A0) down to an A4 or A5 (or even the business-card sized A7) exactly without having to scissor off strips of paper. Or vice versa. They also have a B size that falls in between the A sizes (A4 is kind of close to letter size), and a C standard for envelopes. There's just something nice and logical and pleasing and convenient and most of all sensible about this, as opposed to the sizes commonly in use here.

Take pictures developed in the US for example. We have 3x5", 4x6", 5x7", 8x10" (no 6x9 for some reason) picture sizes and then 8.5x11" letter paper. I'm sure someone thought, hey that looks right and pleasing, save for the fact it's in inches. The problem with these sizes is that, if you want to enlarge a 4x6" photo to 8x10", you are forced to fit it in 6.67x10" and keep 2 strips of white, or you enlarge to 8x12 and chop off 2 inches of your photo. Sorry folks but incrementing each side by steps of 1 inch does not yield the desired effect dispite averting ugly decimal points. These problems are averted using the other system.

I was first forced to use A-sized documents in grad school for conference papers and posters and such, and then exclusively during my stint in Munich. Like you, I was puzzled at first at the system until it clicked when I was shrinking some documents to print 4 per sheet (to save paper). It also clicked because I noticed that just about everything was based on these sizes. Wandering through the bookstores there was a pleasing uniformity of sizes to paperbacks, magazines, even the hardcover books(none of this jaggedness on the bookshelf). Shelves and boxes and folders and containers seemed to conform to this system making things fit nicely and evenly.

Slight tangent speaking of hardcover books; I saw some German versions of my school textbooks out there and they even did that right in my opinion. Take for example my old physics book (by Halliday and Resnick), nearly 1000 pages, hardbound and one of several I had to schlepp with me in my backpack daily risking scoliosis and other spinal injuries. In Germany it was issued as 2 or 3 paperback volumes. But gosh I would have loved a split-volume paperback, I could throw the volume I needed (each course only covered a portion of the book) in the bag and carry it with much more ease and convenience. Of course, they have much more of a pedestrian life (meaning "walking", not "commonplace") out there so it's definitely condusive to that lifestyle. Actually I noticed that paperback seemed more the norm out there. Why do we insist on bulky thick hardbound textbooks out here?

Getting back on topic... nothings perfect, there is indeed at least 1 flaw with the A system. I don't think the hole punch binder spacings were ever formally standardized and I don't really like how it turned out. They all use 2 ring binders rather than 3. I don't have a strong affinity to 3 versus 2 in this case except that where they chose to place the 2 rings by convention seems to be too close to the center which doesn't seem as stable. It's a worthy trade-off in my opinion.