Let me address the last issue first, Carleton, since I've recently
retired from a college faculty and thus know some of their foibles. When
your son's instructors collect assigned reports, your son's reports will
not fit neatly into the stack with his classmates' reports. Some
professors will find that amusing but more likely (and more troublesome)
will be instance by other professors to use standard size paper. It is
fair game for instructors to set standards on such issues as typed
versus hand-written, margins, line spacing, ink color, type font, single
versus double-sided printing, staple location, covers or not, and
paragraph layout issues such as indenting, etc. Your son will find
little solace in administrative appeals against an instructor who
insists on letter size paper. But it's easy enough to pick up a ream of
"copy paper" in letter size to meet the needs of those insistent
instructors. And, as I said, others may either be amused or not care
about A4 versus paper size.
Your A4 paper will be a snug fit in letter size file folders and some
filing cabinets might be a problem.
You will need to search hard for binders and perhaps for hole punches
for A4.
I suppose it is possible that some governmental bodies will object to
your submissions to them on A4. If so, they are likely to be more
intractable than those instructors mentioned above.
You will have to fold your A4 papers in fourths, not thirds, to fit them
into standard sized business envelopes. Or purchase appropriate
envelopes by mail order.
You will get to explain to a lot of people why your paper differs in
size from that used by others around you. To you, this might be a pain
or an opportunity.
When stated in millimeters, both A4 and letter size have dimensions that
are hardly what one would call "round numbers". Frankly, the bit about
A0 paper having an area of exactly 1 m2 doesn't matter to anyone (well,
maybe 3 or 4 people in the world). How often do you depend on the area
of a sheet of paper in terms of square meters?
The reproduction issue is facilitated by the square root of two
relationship between height and width that causes A0 = 2 A1, A1 = 2 A2,
etc., but that hardly comes up as an important issue in the life of most
people. Think about how often you have used a copy machine. How often
did you have to double or halve the size going from original to copy?
What fraction of all the copies that you have made do those double- or
half-size copies represent?
I weighed these issues when ordering the stationary supplies for my
metrication consulting business here in the U.S. and elected to use
letter size.
Jim
Carleton MacDonald wrote:
I’m just about out of the U.S. letter-size paper I bought a while ago,
and need to buy more.
Staples has a deal on Hammermill A4 paper, $57.99 for a case of 10
reams. It’s good multiuse paper suitable for use in inkjet and
officejet printers as well as for other uses. I’d rather get that.
What kind of difficulty, if any, might result from me using A4 paper in
a “letter” world? (For one thing, my son is in his last semester of
community college and may have to write a paper or two.)
Carleton
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
