A4 vs US Letter

http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

by parenthesis • 17 years ago

69 59 17 years ago

mcav• 17 years ago

It's too bad that the US didn't switch to the metric system and A4 paper. It isn't so much about imperial vs. metric (though the metric system's design feels more natural); but it would be nice to have a worldwide standard format.

vaksel• 17 years ago

precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures

bbgm• 17 years ago

Especially when it comes to science. Drove me nuts when I first moved here

ewanmcteagle3• 17 years ago

Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

wvenable• 17 years ago

What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters!

If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.

axod2• 17 years ago

"and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures"

Read that again, and tell me how it makes any sense whatsoever.

  Obsolete: 1. no longer in general use;

ensignavenger• 17 years ago

Officially, the US kind of, sort of, has converted to metric- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

kylec2• 17 years ago

I realize this is, at best, tangentially related to this topic, but a few weeks ago I thought about formatting and printing my resume on A4 for a job fair. My thought was that if I wanted it to stick out from the rest of them, why not have it literally stick out? I decided against it, but I do wonder what sort of impression that would give an employer; as a US employer, how would you react to a resume from someone, also in the US, but printed on A4?

aasarava• 17 years ago

I think my reaction would be the same as if I got a resume from someone printed on 8.5 x 11 paper -- I'd ask the candidate to send me an electronic copy via email. :)

Seriously, though, I've been the hiring manager for a number of positions at various jobs over the past ten years, and the main way of collecting resumes has always been electronic. This is for jobs in both the technical and editorial fields. On the rare occasion that someone mailed me a hard copy of his or her resume, I'd almost always question the person's technical literacy. Worse yet for the candidate, the resume was likely not to get looked at as closely as the others nor re-reviewed because it wasn't in the same email folder.

That's not to say there's no use for hard copies of resumes. During the interviews themselves, of course, it's helpful to be able to look at a piece of paper. But I would usually print out the resume ahead of time and take it with me when I met with a candidate. After that, if I didn't make any important notes on the resume itself, it'd go in the recycling bin.

kylec2• 17 years ago

I guess I should have said that I was at a job fair. I realize that I could have emailed my resume to the company before or after the fair, but I wanted to leave the recruiter with something tangible to both indicate my interest in their company and to display my relevant skills.

However, your comment has prompted me to send an additional, electronic version of my resume to all the companies I gave hard copies to. It can't hurt, and it might give it additional visibility.

marbletiles• 17 years ago

don’t send or distribute documents that depend on external factors to display and print properly. So, no Word documents, no Quark XPress documents, no PageMaker files, no AppleWorks files and so on.

Isn't quite right. Sure, that'll be a problem if you're distributing your document for print, but otherwise of that list it's only Word that insists on reformatting the display for the currently selected printer. The other apps will honour the page setup the document was created with, and only give problems at print time.

It's surprising that .doc became the standard for resumes when the display for the recipient can vary so extravagantly from the display for the creator. Oh wait, it's not surprising; it's depressing.

ctingom• 17 years ago

You can still get A4 sized paper here in the states, although not at OfficeMax (I don't think). Most paper stores would have it though. The trouble is all of our file cabinets, folders, and whatnot are designed for letter size.

newt0311• 17 years ago

"The file-format [PDF] is only semi-open and Acrobat files are larger than I’d like them to be, when compared to the amount of information encoded within them. There’s also the small point of cost."

I would like to point out that this was written in 2002 when it was still valid. PDF is now an ISO approved standard (ISO 32000) and therefore quite open. Also, making PDF files at least for viewing is a breeze. If you use latex (and why wouldn't you?), pdflatex works great and can even handle edge cases like PDF forms using hyperref. If not, PDF printers are still a dime a dozen (quite a few are actually free) which can produce PDFs without any hassle.

In conclusion: PDF owns all.

fauigerzigerk3• 17 years ago

That's right but it's a pity that PDFs by default don't even include their unicode text content nor the correct sequence of words. They're good for document fidelity viewing and printing but horrible for further processing and even for interactive tasks like copy and paste. We urgently need a PDF successor.

stass• 17 years ago

What do you mean by 'unicode text contents'? Of course, text in PDF could not be pasted, but it's not a format intended for "editing', we have plain text for this. PDF was created to distribute text documents, drawings, and so on in a way that it will look exactly the same everywhere. But unlike postscript, it includes some high-level features like word indexes, protection and so on, so you can search inside PDFs, add notes, place interactive elements - things impossible in other formats at all.

Thus I don't really understand where the problem with format itself is? If you have suggestions regarding features needed, take a part in ISO comittee.

sketerpot2• 17 years ago

Oh man, don't get me started! I wrote some PDF processing software last year -- it was supposed to extract pinout diagrams from integrated circuit datasheets -- and to extract the text was a ridiculous task. Since characters can be specified in any order, what I had to do was look at their positions on the rendered page and then clump those into words with some overly complicated graph algorithms. Working with PDF should not be this hard.

If I were making a PDF successor, this would be one of the top problems to fix. At least make text selection work properly! And simplify the format a little, would you please? To get any sort of compatibility with my PDF processing program I had to write it as a custom rendering backend for the Poppler PDF engine. It should not be this hard.

DavidHogan• 17 years ago

"PC Load Letter"

natrius• 17 years ago

If you watch the movie with French subtitles, it says "CP Charge A4".

RK2• 17 years ago

Moreover, I understand A-series paper — especially A4 — is slowly becoming the norm in US colleges and universities, if for no other reason than making it easier for students and staff to photocopy articles from (inevitably A4-sized) journals.

Has anyone actually seen this? I can't say that I've ever seen people at any of the US universities I've been to using A4, with the exception of some Europeans preparing some paperwork to send to the EU.

sketerpot2• 17 years ago

A4 paper doesn't fit well into typical folders and binders sold in America, and I didn't see A4 paper at all until I went to another country for a while. US universities tend to just have the printer set to scale pages to fit the paper by default. You end up with wider margins when printing A4 journal articles to Letter paper, but those can be handy for notes.

lgriffith• 17 years ago

If its US, its BAD!

If its European, its GOOD!

If it has been decided by some unaccountable academic pin head committee to be forced down the throat of others, its GOOD!

If its been around for the better part of a 1000 years and used by common folk in their daily lives, its BAD!

Hmmm.... I see a pattern here. If its used by people who think they have a RIGHT to be free from being FORCED by others to do what they would not otherwise do, its BAD. If its the consequence of arbitrary Governmental decree and enforced at the point of a gun, its GOOD.

In my opinion, there is no amount of rationalization that will make this good.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

I don't recall any judgement call like this in the article. The Good/Bad dichotomy is something you are inventing in your own mind.

edw2• 17 years ago

He sees a pattern _here_, not in the article. He's talking about the people _here_:

"It's too bad that the US didn't..."

"...its[sic] pretty asinine, ... and USA is stuck using obsolete..."

This has nothing to do with the metric system: You could define a hypothetical Z0 paper size as 42.81" x 30.27", a square yard, and then define paper sizes Z1, Z2, and so forth. Each would be half the area of the previous by performing the same operation. It's not as if 210 or 297 are particularly easy numbers to deal with, or that having precisely a square meter of material is all that important. Is it important that a sheet of A4 paper is about one eighth of a square meter?

And in defense of US Letter, its proportions are closer to the golden ratio than A4, which looks too skinny for me. But they're both too wide for letter writing; I think either octavo-sized or A5 paper is a more natural width for printing or hand-writing a single column of text. Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style – to mention one of a potential dozen or so authorities – recommends text columns be a maximum of about two alphabets of lowercase characters.

captainobvious• 17 years ago

    Can anyone explain the relationship between 4:3 and 16:9?  I know 16:9 is each number in 4:3 squared, but is there a geometric reason/interpretation for this choice?

Shamiq• 17 years ago

Do us a favor and delete any leading spaces in your comment. The two or more space you have is causing...

  the word wrap to mess up.

Please have a heart!

aston• 17 years ago

The squared relationship is actually pure coincidence. The dude who proposed the next popular ratio took all of the common presentation ratios (like 4:3 for TV, 1.85:1 for film, etc.) and laid them all on top of each other. The overlapping sweet spot was just about 16:9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Why_16:9.3...

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

It's nice to see the rationales, such as they are, behind each of these, but in the end we are left with a religious argument. There are good points to each, and they have been mentioned over and over and over again.

Very little will change, and arguing the merits of each system is pretty pointless. Better is to be aware of the advantages, the disadvantages, the conversions and the differences.

It's only units. Be aware, and work with them. There's no point in arguing.

zandorg• 17 years ago

I almost got into Hollywood by getting paper, tags, washers, from LA, and printing/binding my script, and sending it from the UK to the screenwriting agent in Los Angeles. They only read properly bound US Letter scripts (with the right WEIGHT of paper). However, I fudged up by saying I had an updated version, he said send a PDF, and he probably binned the old one and forgot about the PDF.

petercooper• 17 years ago

I'm in the UK and I deliberately buy US Letter paper and print on that. It's a nicer shape.

A4 vs US Letter

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