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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).

Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:

The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram

[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]

ISO 216 A series papers formats

AO

A1

A3

A5

A7

A6

Et.

A4

Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.

Source: Financial Times

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    6 months ago

    Well, one still could do it like how many countries transitioned to the metric system: slap the traditional names onto things that are actually now defined by the metric system, like how China’s catty, about 0.60478… kg, became 0.5kg. Just slap “Letter” onto A4.

    • Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      That’s going to make some driver developers very upset. And sensors in printer cartridges that can sense both A4 and Letter.

      I say we just balls the whole thing. Screen or pencils.

      • brisk
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        6 months ago

        For technical purposes that need to handle both you can just disambiguate it with “Letter (new)” and “Letter (work or school)”