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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.
As a math nerd, I appreciate the fractaline nature of your paper.
But as an american, what is the practical advantage?? The sizes are so far apart, and you dont get papers with different ratios? Like for example Letter and Legal are both 8.5 inches wide, can be used in any standard cheap household printer, legal is just longer so you can fit more stuff on the page. Letter paper folds into thirds to fit snuggly in an envelope and legal folds into fourths. Other paper sizes are so niche and rarely used why does it matter if theyre a perfect mathematical ratio or not?
Just use multiple pages if needed?
Who needs all their words on a single huge page like some sort of scroll?
It takes less paper to print 1 page of legal if that's what your text fits on than it does 2 pages of normal paper if said text doesn't take up all of the second piece of paper.
When you're printing large documents (10 or more pages let's say) that starts to be significant savings in thickness of a stack, too.
It's not one huge page, it's an extra 2 inches, or ~25% longer