Damn, that Mercator projection making A4 look almost as big as Greenland...
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Remember Africa is about three times larger than Canada
Pretty insane to consider that sort of scale, this projection really distorts reality
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It's a map of the largest PDF, world for scale
The A standard is not as perfect as you might think. Because the paper manufacturers round that perfect root 2 down to a whole integer in size every time, there is accumulated error in every size.
You might not notice a millimeter or two on an A1, but as the size of the paper gets smaller, the error gets bigger because of the rounding.
It really doesn't matter in practice. Important part is that you can fold A4 into A5
I'll always upvote Matt Parker
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Oh, let's also remember that A4 is a member of beautiful variant of an "SI system for paper". Want a paper the size of an A4 folded double? We have A~~8~~5. Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.
- Statement: "I want a piece of paper that I can fold twice to get exactly a US letter size."
- Response: "You must be crazy."
Edit: Did a fat-fingering
What on earth are you on about with those numbers? 😅
A0 is the base size, with an area of one square meter. Fold that in half and you get A1. Fold that in half and you get A2, and so on. Regular printer paper is A4. You’ll rarely, if ever, see sizes smaller than A6.
I fat-fingered the A5, otherwise the numbers were right?
I'm aware how the system works, I just wrote about it using A4 as the "base". A3 is what you fold to get A4, A2 folds to give A3, etc.
I didn't know A0 was exactly 1m^2^ though, TIL!
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I have a pocket notebook size A7. A6 is too big for some pockets.
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They do have a paper that can fold once to get a US letter though; i am only posting about it because i only learned about it two years ago: 11x17, aka, "tabloid" size.
Some desktop printers can even print on it.
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Not a meme; I am an American and I think this would be the exact right kind of petty bullshit to respond with, please push for this, Canadians. It is exactly this kind of petty, stupid bullshit that Trump participates in and responds most to.
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And before you ask, of course there's an easy system for various sizes that all relate to each other.
What did you think? That we hadn't thought this through?
Why did they stop at A7? Would be fun to be able to buy A20 paper for microprinting projects.
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I'm American and have worked in corporate offices all my life and grew up around the printing industry.
A4/SI is super common here too. "Letter" is just something used by home users. But very often A4 is sold as "Letter A4" right next to the other paper.
Now "legal" print format is a true abomination and unfortunately is much less likely to be easily replaced.
Letter A4? Lol. Hopefully businesses start advertising things by the double-pounder-kg or the quart-Litre haha
Is letter A4 just A4 with emotional support?
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Fun fact: ISO paper sizes are a transposition of German DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) sizes.
The German's obsession for standards is their main usefulness to humanity.
I dunno... I feel like I've dealt with enough German machinery and bureaucracy for 3 lifetimes.
Their "obsession" for standards is only for the standard of making everything 10 times more complicated than it needs to be.
Fun fact, there is a standard butt & a standard shit accoding to the DIN.
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I think this is a little bit outdated at least for the Philippines. Goverment documents now primarily use A4 to comply with ISO standards. Some places such as schools may sometimes use the letter size (commonly referred to as short size here) but A4 is now much more common.
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Canada should drive on the left to really stick it to the yanks.
Ho ho, let's not overreact
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I never understood why we use ISO guidelines for everything in Chile, metric system and so on... except for paper sizes 🤦♂️
I am so glad I use open street map and other projects which use it such as Organic Maps. Truly a godsend
Why does A4 have an odd number of millimeters? Why not 290, flat?
A0 is a square meter. Its sides are self similar, such that the ratio of long to short edge stays the same when you cut one in the middle, and thus create a new long and short edge.
Each cut produces two sheets of the next Ax number, so A4 is four times halved compared to A0, or a sixteenth of a square meter.
That property of being able to halve is achieved with a ratio of the square root of 2, so unfortunately the measurements in absolute numbers get pretty odd.
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Definitions and math:
- A series paper has a height/width ratio of √2
- Each paper in the series is half the area of the last
- A0 has an area of exactly 1m²
The answer is actually fairly interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#A_series
Since A series sizes share the same aspect ratio, they can be scaled to other A series sizes without being distorted, and two sheets can be reduced to fit on exactly one sheet without any cutoff or margins.
Because not enough people know about the B size standard, which has much more reasonable widths.
Pretty sure the geometry of the image is off, despite the numbers being correct. The even sizes are slightly too square and the odd sizes are slightly too narrow. It makes me feel like somebody accidentally compressed the entire image horizontally before overlaying text over it.
Below is my attempt at remaking the image:
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I propose a new standard for printing.
Laser-etchable circular paper with 2 holes in middle which helps rotate it on a spindle, and hang it without unvanted rotation.
The printer will have a spindle with 2 prongs, and single axis movable laser assembly used to etch the paper as it spins.
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