The A standard is not as perfect as you might think. Because the paper manufacturers round that perfect root 2 down to a whole integer in size every time, there is accumulated error in every size.

You might not notice a millimeter or two on an A1, but as the size of the paper gets smaller, the error gets bigger because of the rounding.

And before you ask, of course there's an easy system for various sizes that all relate to each other.

What did you think? That we hadn't thought this through?

Damn, that Mercator projection making A4 look almost as big as Greenland...

I am so glad I use open street map and other projects which use it such as Organic Maps. Truly a godsend

Fun fact: ISO paper sizes are a transposition of German DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) sizes.

The German's obsession for standards is their main usefulness to humanity.

Oh, let's also remember that A4 is a member of beautiful variant of an "SI system for paper". Want a paper the size of an A4 folded double? We have A85. Want something that folds perfectly to A4? A3. One more fold? A2.

• Statement: "I want a piece of paper that I can fold twice to get exactly a US letter size."
• Response: "You must be crazy."

Edit: Did a fat-fingering

I never understood why we use ISO guidelines for everything in Chile, metric system and so on... except for paper sizes 🤦‍♂️

I think this is a little bit outdated at least for the Philippines. Goverment documents now primarily use A4 to comply with ISO standards. Some places such as schools may sometimes use the letter size (commonly referred to as short size here) but A4 is now much more common.

Not a meme; I am an American and I think this would be the exact right kind of petty bullshit to respond with, please push for this, Canadians. It is exactly this kind of petty, stupid bullshit that Trump participates in and responds most to.

Surprised that many countries use the US version

I'm American and have worked in corporate offices all my life and grew up around the printing industry.

A4/SI is super common here too. "Letter" is just something used by home users. But very often A4 is sold as "Letter A4" right next to the other paper.

Now "legal" print format is a true abomination and unfortunately is much less likely to be easily replaced.

Canada should drive on the left to really stick it to the yanks.

Canada almost switched in the 1970s, but lost its nerve