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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
Well, it’s 2024, so they mostly say things like “out of A4 paper - load A4 paper in tray number 3”. But yeah, they used to.
Interesting, no photos of that message come up.
TBF, I only remember messages about “out of paper” or “all trays are empty”. Why specify paper size if the printer accepts different ones, anyway?
I’m thinking it lets a tray run out, then you ask it to print on a certain size of paper, and in response it asks for more of that size paper. Then you know which exactly it’s out of. Good for an office too where you don’t know who printed what.