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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.
We have trouble fitting all our freedom on your kooky, internationally-recognized sizes
Here’s a comparison using the most sensible units possible:
Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that’s dumb, we should switch.
I’m British and you are not alone, worse still, I spent a year in the USA and never even noticed.
Also, I’m pretty sure A4 runs through an American printer just fine.
Most printers support a variety of paper sizes
They jam less