Mathew Zetter asked in USMA 26711:
I've noticed that paper weight is given in LB, e.g. 20 pound paper; but the metric version is in "g/m^2". These seem to be in different dimensions, but "pounds" probably means "pounds-mass per inch square". Does any one know what paper weight really measures? Thank you for your time.
Matthew Zotter
If I remember correctly, the 20 pounds refers to the mass of 500 sheets of paper of that particular size, while the metric value refers to the mass of a square metre of the paper, regardless of the size or the number of sheets. In other words the pounds gives the mass of a certain number of sheets of a certain size, while the metric number is a measure of the mass per unit area of a single sheet.
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