Comment by db48x

Comment by db48x 3 months ago

Here in the US we just print posters at whatever size we want. We don’t have to rely on someone to have standardized the sizes of posters. Large–format printers often go up to eight feet wide, so you can print something as big as a wall if you want (and as long as you like, because they print on a _roll_ of paper instead of a sheet). Computers have made elegant ratios irrelevant.

But if you really think it’s important, then you can consider a series of sizes like tabloid, letter, and memo to be equivalent to A3, A4, and A5. Each is exactly half the area of the previous, and can be had by dividing the larger size in half along the longer side.

tialaramex 3 months ago

> But if you really think it’s important, then you can consider a series of sizes like tabloid, letter, and memo to be equivalent to A3, A4, and A5.

This seems like you entirely missed the thread? The whole point is that this actually works for the A-series and in your made up US series it can't work because the ratio is wrong.

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db48x 3 months ago

These are not made up sizes. They are standard paper sizes available in any store. Most ordinary househole printers won’t actually print on tabloid, and some won’t print on memo, but all copiers (and multifunction scanner/printers) can copy two letter pages and print them side by side, scaled down to memo size, on a single sheet letter of paper. It’s just a button you press, or maybe a checkbox you check, or whatever. It’s not magic.

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- tialaramex 3 months ago
  
  The sizes aren't what I said you'd made up. The series is, because of course this doesn't work properly with your scheme:
  Let's try, start with 216 x 279 Letter and we'll scale that so we can fit two on the 279 long side, so they're just under 140mm wide now, memo size, but um, when we do that the scaled down pages are only 180mm high, even though they've got 216mm - there's a huge amount of empty white space wasted (at the top, or the bottom, or both) and that's because this ratio does not work.
  
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  db48x 3 months ago
  
  But nobody cares, they do it anyway. Or they did when making paper copies was more common. In practice we just read a PDF on a screen.
  Plus the copiers are a bit more clever than you give them credit for. Instead of scaling the whole page down they put a bounding box around the actual content on the pages, to exclude the margins, and then scale that down to fit. The size of the margins changes slightly but not enough that anybody cares. This is especially true when you’re copying a bound book because there’s a really big margin in the middle to accommodate the binding. You don’t need that any more once you’ve printed the pages on a single sheet of paper.
  
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