

A4 vs US Letter - parenthesis
http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

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

~~~
ewanmcteagle
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.

~~~
asciilifeform
Tell us how much a cubic mile of water weighs in ounces. Then get back to us
re: the "arbitrary" Metric system.

~~~
ewanmcteagle
This is exactly the issue. Making it easier to solve some problems that are
very rare in the day to day lives of most of the world is not a good reason to
force people to switch measurement systems.

~~~
asciilifeform
Converting between differently sized units of measurement is an everyday
problem if anything is. I enjoy being able to do so by shifting a decimal
point.

------
RK
_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.

~~~
sketerpot
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.

------
kylec
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
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.

~~~
kylec
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.

------
bonaldi
_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
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.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
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
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.

------
DavidHogan
"PC Load Letter"

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

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

------
captainobvious

        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?

~~~
aston
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_\(image\)#Why_16:9.3F)

------
newt0311
"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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
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
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.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I didn't mean pasting into the PDF but copying parts of a PDF in order to
paste them elsewhere. This is not deterministically possible because (most)
PDF documents do not contain a sequence of letters or words but rather a
sequence of painting instructions, which can be different from the order in
which the document is read.

Also, the codes used to represent letters refer to fonts not to unicode code
points (or other character sets for that matter). So my problem is that
extracting text from PDF has to use a heuristic approach that always fails at
some point. That's why copy and paste out of PDF documents leads to such
strange results sometimes.

The use case I'm talking about is to distribute documents for viewing,
printing AND further processing.

The issues I have with the PDF format are not solvable by adding features
because the features are already there. PDF documents can contain unicode text
and a very large number of other structural information as you have pointed
out. I know because I have written PDF software and I have read the spec very
carefully top to bottom.

There are two major problems:

* The PDF format is incredibly bloated, difficult to process, and it allows documents to be distributed without deterministically extractable text. (And I don't mean the case where the author deliberately restricts text extraction)

* The widely used tools to create PDF files, by default, do not use the PDF features that would allow deterministic text extraction.

The PDF format is older than the web. Data integration and search were not
important tasks when PDF was created in 1992. It was meant for printing and
viewing only.

The only way to solve these problems would be to remove features from the PDF
spec or to mandate the use of other features. Both would be incompatible with
previous versions in a way that is completely unacceptable. That's why I think
there has to be a new much simpler format that leaves all the old arcane
baggage behind and facilitates reliable processing in addition to viewing and
printing.

~~~
twopoint718
I have a question that maybe you can answer, having really perused the PDF
spec. Is it true that PDF removed the turing-completeness of PostScript?

I had heard something that the main reason for creating PDF was that you
couldn't render a single PS page without rendering all the ones preceding it.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Yes that's true. There are no loops or gotos and functions have no side
effects. PostScript has all of that. But I think it would have been sufficient
to remove the possibility of global side effects to support out of order
rendering of pages. A purely functional language without global state could've
done the trick.

So I suspect there were other reasons as well for removing so many features.
Maybe the complexity of interpreters. I don't know.

------
lgriffith
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.

~~~
jrockway
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.

~~~
edw
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.

~~~
jrockway
I like A4 better than US Letter. Perhaps because it is "different".

~~~
edw
Back when I liked A4 more than US Letter, it was pretty much because I had a
deep need to appear sophisticated by making conscious decisions to adopt
exotic, European things. See also self-hating Americans who are against GMO
and anything the US or any US company does because some Europeans are against
it for political or economic – not aesthetic or scientific or otherwise
relevant – reasons.

On another note, the original article writer spends a lot of time on paper
sizing issues when resizing a PDF to fit on a different paper size is easy.

