nursing a paper fetish

Since your telling me about A4 paper that you adopted, I am become uncharacteristically obsessed, especially for a paper that I will rarely use (since I don’t print much in the first place). I guess it’s the desire to be ahead of the curve of the rest of the US population.

So, I simply looked up more information. I learned that the ISO 216 standard means that you can turn reduce two A4 sheets to fit on one A4 through multiplying by 71%, equivalent to the square root of 2. Thinking it through, I wondered where the heck they came up with the 841 mm by 1189 mm as the A0 sheet. It turned out that there is no other way to maintain the ratio, and that there is a formula for it.

The US could have used yards, and patterned itself similarly. A US A4 standard would then be 7.6″ by 10.7″. That is quite small. The metric system is larger, 84.1 cm and 29.6 cm. If the US decided to keep one of the two dimensions, but have the other fit the sqrt(2) paradigm, then you could have a 7.8″ width or a 12″ width.