Printing industry slowly metricating?
I don't know about the US, but in the UK the printing industry was one of the first industries to be metricated. The stationery merchants and office furniture merchants loved it - they could reduce the number of stock lines dramatically when quarto and foolscap lines of stationery were replaced with A4 lines of stationery (it halved the number of stock lines that they carried with no real reduction in customer choice).
We are not talking about the same "printing industry."
You are referring to what might be called "consumer printing" or "PC printing." Even in the USA computer printers and software have long supported a variety of paper sizes. (Although, as you point out, they usually default to US Letter size.)
I was referring to the commercial printing industry, where you send them a document to print (typically in Quark or Adobe InDesign), say 10,000 copies on a wet-ink printing machine, then their bindery cuts, binds, folds, packages, etc., the product. If you are going to do a 100,000 piece bulk mailing, or print 30,000 full-color 64-page catalogs, this is the method you would use.
In the commercial printing arena, I have seen a bit of "familiarization" with metric happen in the last 20 years in the USA (I have no experience with printers outside the USA). We can now send them documents prepared with software set to millimeters and they know what to do with them.
That said, they still are far more comfortable with points and picas than millimeters. The paper they buy (always larger than the final product) is specified in inches, and thickness in pounds (using several different scales: a 20 lb cover stock is a different weight than a 20 lb paper). We may require an A4 finish trim, but it will probably be printed four-up (four copies on one sheet) on a 22x26" piece of paper then trimmed to size.
I certainly believe the commercial printing industry will metricate, but it is moving slower than other industries.
Jim
Electrical Engineer
Industrial manufacturing manager
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
www.qsicorp.com
