Henry Spencer wrote on 2002-05-02 17:49 UTC: > That does make a very convenient excuse for insisting that the other guys > incur all the pain of conversion. Unfortunately, this does *not* help in > selling the idea, which was exactly my point.
You misunderstood. *We* went through the necessary conversion pain already last century. You just missed the global paper format conversion party fun between 1922 and 1975 and it's now time for you to finally catch up. Latecomers to a game are not welcome to rewrite the rules! Here is the timeline when A4 became the national standard all around the globe: Germany (1922), Belgium (1924), Netherlands (1925), Norway (1926), Switzerland (1929), Sweden (1930), Soviet Union (1934), Hungary (1938), Italy (1939), Uruguay (1942), Argentina and Brazil (1943), Spain (1947), Austria (1948), Romania (1949), Japan (1951), Denmark and Czechoslovakia (1953), Israel and Portugal (1954), Yugoslavia (1956), India and Poland (1957), United Kingdom (1959), Venezuela (1962), New Zealand (1963), Iceland (1964), Mexico (1965), South Africa (1966), France/Peru/Turkey (1967), Chile (1968), Greece/Simbabwe/Singapur (1970), Bangladesh (1972), Thailand and Barbados (1973), Australia and Ecuador (1974), Columbia and Kuwait (1975). It finally became both an international standard (ISO 216) as well as the official United Nations document format in 1975. The US (ANSI) tried to convince ISO to add the 216x279 mm format as NA4 to ISO 216 in 1975. Fortunately, every other ISO member considered the idea completely ridiculous and out-of-the-question to add an only slightly different format series with no practical advantages whatsoever to the standard. ANSI has since then adopted the ISO A0-A4 sizes only for technical drawings (ANSI/ASME Y14.1m-1995), and also that only relatively recently, as far as I understand on request of the US car industry. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
