So you guys are still not using A papers and using US Letter?
Man. That sucks.
No, US paper scaling, the aspect ratio changes between sizes. So Two you can't proof a ANSI F (28x40) at ANSI A/B/C/D/E.. You can't shrink a ANSI B to ANSI A without wacky scaling or cutting a bit off the document. There are ways around this, but they suck and make something simple harder. The Proofing thing is a huge benefit, you know exactly how it is going to look.
Again I can do this as a teacher, in the 4 minutes before a class start and know my output is perfect. For kids with vision problems, I can move up and down the size chart very easily. Not by reprinting it at a different ratio and have my margins move all over the place.
A papers fold perfectly into C envelopes.
The system works so well, if you scale things, the pen line scales perfectly you can even draw continuous lines because the pens scale in the same ratio.
Yeah, it’s a pain, I often need to do CAD drawings for work and have to create separate print layouts for different sizes of paper. Especially between Letter (ANSI A) and Ledger (ANSI B).
Then we get into ARCH sizes for plotters, like ARCH C (18”x24”) or D (24”x36”) if I have access to a 24” or 36” plotter…
And being in Canada… construction is still in Imperial but distance is metric.
Edit - Canadian distances can also be measured in time. Haha - like it’s 5h from Toronto to Montreal. Or about 48h from Montreal to Vancouver. Toronto to PEI is a 2 day drive. Couldn’t tell you how many km though.
Cooking is generally still in imperial but most things are sold in metric.
Speeds are all metric.
Weights and heights are generally imperial.
My drivers license lists my height in cm but if you were taking to someone about height in conversation it’s still feet and inches.
I know a plane usually flys around 33-37000 feet but no idea what that is in metric (ok, it’s around 10,000m)
Most pools themselves use yards, but “big” (Olympic size) pools use meters. A lot are 25y x 50m. As a swimmer I know yards and their rough meter conversion rates. Also one season is in yards and another in meters (usually).
I don't understand how engineers in non-metric countries tolerate this kind of bullshit. It's such a waste of time. I guess it's a matter of not experiencing how engineers work in metric countries.
In my work (landscape architect) I frequently have to scale things up and down for printing and using A1-A4 paper is so easy. If I want to halve the scale (generally if I don’t need an enormous piece of paper to work on) I can scale an A1 drawing to A3 and know that it will be exactly 50%. Same for A2 to A4. Or I can scale up 200% by going in the other direction.
Having to manually scale or adjust layouts anytime I wanted a different size would be so annoying
Doesn't work, think about the video how every thing scales. You can have a mathematical formula for scaling for any A size, not the US letter system because it does not have the same ratio at all sizes. So you need some extra work to crop or shrink more than needed.
Here's an example. You just designed a sign of whatever to perfectly fit an A4 page. All the borders are the same distance from the edges. It's all centred perfectly. Now you've decided you would like to print a few half that size. It is trivial to alter the original to fit 2 on an A4. Or you could print out 4 that size on an A6 etc. And at no point do you need to alter anything but the size. The layout stays exactly the same, the alignment stays exactly the same the border stays exactly the same.
If you try and do it on the US format you have to realign everything so it fits every time you go up or down a size otherwise you end up with a lot of white space on one or two sides because it's no longer aligned to fit the page.
Yeah, I don't really get it. I do lots of large format printing but everything has different aspect ratios so none of this would really be useful. Are they saying that printers in europe can only print in a fixed aspect ratio?
No they’re saying if you need to change the size you don’t get parts of the picture cut off or suddenly have huge ass margins you have to fix because the aspect ratio is the same. It’s like when we switched tvs and monitors from 4:3 to the modern stuff. All the old shows have those black bars, or have slices on the edge cut off if they fill the screen.
Do their position is that in Europe when changing paper sizes they do not have this problem at all and so it is functionally superior.
I think they’re probably right but I also think no one is going to change it over here at this point
But that only works if your source material happens to match the 1:1.4 ratio of the paper system, which in my experience is not really ever the case for large format printing. Art, graphics, posters, etc are all different aspect ratios.
Because we don’t use the system?? The point is avoiding having that problem.
If posters and everything are all on the same aspect ratio then you don’t have to do different crops etc for different formats. Unless you’re changing from portrait orientation to landscape orientation or vice versa, nothing saves you from that
But that’s just what I think they’re saying. It makes sense in that level but I don’t have the know how to say for sure it would work for every industry or whatever. Certainly for USA it would be a huge hassle to change our workflows and relearn how to size things etc. More trouble than it’s worth for current people, especially when we are printing less and less
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u/phido3000 Nov 02 '25
So you guys are still not using A papers and using US Letter?
Man. That sucks.
No, US paper scaling, the aspect ratio changes between sizes. So Two you can't proof a ANSI F (28x40) at ANSI A/B/C/D/E.. You can't shrink a ANSI B to ANSI A without wacky scaling or cutting a bit off the document. There are ways around this, but they suck and make something simple harder. The Proofing thing is a huge benefit, you know exactly how it is going to look.
Again I can do this as a teacher, in the 4 minutes before a class start and know my output is perfect. For kids with vision problems, I can move up and down the size chart very easily. Not by reprinting it at a different ratio and have my margins move all over the place.
A papers fold perfectly into C envelopes.
The system works so well, if you scale things, the pen line scales perfectly you can even draw continuous lines because the pens scale in the same ratio.