Dear Mike, To my mind there is no benefit in any of the paper sizes you mention over the A series and B series of international Paper sizes (ISO 216).
Because A and B series paper sizes are coordinated to minimise waste when cutting or folding many fewer trees need be cut to produce them and this has led to their success all around the world. Here in Australia, we adopted the A series especially A4 and A3 for almost all everyday paper uses. For example: A4 is letter paper or for folding to make an A5 size book A3 is for posters and for photocopying then folding to make an A4 booklet A2 is commonly used for newspapers A1 might be a wrapping paper A0 at 841 millimetres by 1189 millimetres has an area of one square metre The B series is not so common. My wife and I have only used it for music manuscript paper for orchestral scores. You will find Marcus Kuhn's excellent description of the A series paper sizes at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html Cheers, Pat Naughtin PO Box 305 Belmont 3216 Geelong, Australia 61 3 5241 2008 Pat Naughtin is manager of http://www.metricationmatters.com an internet website that focuses on the many issues, methods and processes that individuals, groups, companies, and nations use when upgrading to the metric system. Contact Pat Naughtin at [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 2007 05 30 2:03 AM, "Mike Millet" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > While walking into the bookstore at my local university today I was looking at > the bound spiral notebooks for a replacement because I'd filled the previous > one with all sorts of fun math equations. > > This was an adventure in odd units, and I saw ten by eight, eleven by nine, > eight and a half by eleven, ten by thirteen, and probably a couple other inch > measures that I missed in the pile. > > My question is why are there so many other inch formats besides the standard > 8.5x11? > > And while we're on the topic, I also noticed that all our printers and > scanners and copiers at work can use the A4 series papers and the B series SI > paper formats. I was kind of surprised at this but I've never seen metric > paper sold or available anywhere in the US. It's nice to see it's there though > if the US ever decides to switch > > For the record I settled on the 279mm x 228mm (11x9in) size :). > > I also discovered that if you type 11in into Google and hit enter the first > thing you see is the conversion to centimeters. Apparently it's so common to > do that that Google just assumes that's what you want. > > Mike
