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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
To be fair, A4 yields unwieldy pages that are too long to comfortably read. And when do you ever need the feature to fold an A4 sheet into A5?
I do this all the time. I print two pages on one A4 sheet (or rather four, two on each side) and then fold them so they are like a leaflet.
That's the main advantage of the system โ you don't have to design things differently depending on how big you want to print them. You can scale the same design to an A6 flyer or an A2 Poster.