3 ms·

I too moved from Europe to the US and the paper sizes are the worst - have you tried folding it? It doesn’t work. > almost a whole value But not a whole value

I too moved from Europe to the US and the paper sizes are the worst - have you tried folding it? It doesn’t work. > almost a whole value But not a whole value.

foobarian 4y ago
That's the thing, though, the folding was never helpful to me even while in Europe; it was a Nice Thing but I never used it in practice. Maybe if I was there now I could take advantage of it for proofing large format prints, like one of the sibling comments pointed out. But even the envelope thing was not helpful - the only envelopes we had were the blue communist ones, the international ones, and you ended up folding the letters at the edges to make it fit. > But not a whole value. Right, I said that because one of the dimensions is a half. However in practice those values behave as nice round numbers as well, because in the imperial measure context most things are sized to powers of two, i.e. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc.
- jahewson 4y ago
  I feel like you don’t get to criticise the value of the system if you grow up in a communist country that lacked access to the different sizes of paper and envelopes that make the system useful. Clearly you missed out! Making an A5 booklet from A4 and mailing it is something any print shop I grew up near would do. No idea what the advantage of a whole unit is supposed to be; nobody is sat around with a ruler measuring A4 cuts. The tolerances for paper manufacturing need to be specified in tiny fractions of a mm either way. As for actual typographers, they don’t use metric units, the size of the paper is not of great concern.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    Heh, that's probably a fair point. I added some more thoughts on the value of whole units in a sibling post. Like I mentioned it's mostly subjective, and has some utility to me when working with paper and measuring cuts. So yes indeed with a ruler, measuring cuts. :-)
- Symbiote 4y ago
  I would have expected a communist (i.e. poor) country to have more use for some properties of the paper system: 1. You can easily calculate the weight of that letter without a scale, and stick exactly to the 20g limit (or whatever) for the cheapest postage rate. (I remember doing this in the 1990s for air mail letters to relatives.) 2. You can crush 2, 4 or even 8 normal A4 pages onto a single sheet while photocopying, and save paper/money. Although maybe by the time photocopiers were available in your country, the cost of paper was no longer an issue. (I would press the 2-on-1 or even 4-on-1 button when printing at university, to halve the cost at essentially no inconvenience.)

I too moved from Europe to the US and the paper sizes are the worst - have you tried folding it? It doesn’t work. > almost a whole value But not a whole value.

foobarian 4y ago

That's the thing, though, the folding was never helpful to me even while in Europe; it was a Nice Thing but I never used it in practice. Maybe if I was there now I could take advantage of it for proofing large format prints, like one of the sibling comments pointed out. But even the envelope thing was not helpful - the only envelopes we had were the blue communist ones, the international ones, and you ended up folding the letters at the edges to make it fit. > But not a whole value. Right, I said that because one of the dimensions is a half. However in practice those values behave as nice round numbers as well, because in the imperial measure context most things are sized to powers of two, i.e. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc.

jahewson 4y ago
I feel like you don’t get to criticise the value of the system if you grow up in a communist country that lacked access to the different sizes of paper and envelopes that make the system useful. Clearly you missed out! Making an A5 booklet from A4 and mailing it is something any print shop I grew up near would do. No idea what the advantage of a whole unit is supposed to be; nobody is sat around with a ruler measuring A4 cuts. The tolerances for paper manufacturing need to be specified in tiny fractions of a mm either way. As for actual typographers, they don’t use metric units, the size of the paper is not of great concern.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Heh, that's probably a fair point. I added some more thoughts on the value of whole units in a sibling post. Like I mentioned it's mostly subjective, and has some utility to me when working with paper and measuring cuts. So yes indeed with a ruler, measuring cuts. :-)
Symbiote 4y ago
I would have expected a communist (i.e. poor) country to have more use for some properties of the paper system: 1. You can easily calculate the weight of that letter without a scale, and stick exactly to the 20g limit (or whatever) for the cheapest postage rate. (I remember doing this in the 1990s for air mail letters to relatives.) 2. You can crush 2, 4 or even 8 normal A4 pages onto a single sheet while photocopying, and save paper/money. Although maybe by the time photocopiers were available in your country, the cost of paper was no longer an issue. (I would press the 2-on-1 or even 4-on-1 button when printing at university, to halve the cost at essentially no inconvenience.)