I’ve started to determine the right package of paper towels to purchase according to the cents per square meter value. You can discern the quality of a deal at the grocery by referring to the ‘cents per X’ market located on price tag next to the marked price.
I’m beginning to turn sour on the ‘2 Jumbo-Mega-Rolls are the equivalent of 8 Super rolls’ scheme that’s en vogue. Are there retractable roll holders to accommodate for all of this?
It doesn’t help that many of these packages are priced and then marked down in ways to entice the buyer toward purchasing them instead of more reasonably priced and proportioned ones.
So really, how absorbant the paper is should be the gold standard, so let's ask manufacturers to put that on the packaging?
It is complicated area. Not to even get to loo roll. Where I noticed that the ecological one I bought feels quality wise inferior to normal one. And this is premium type of stuff. So it sits between the premium and cheap, but more on premium end.
Fold an 8.5" into a square (right triangle) and the long edge is exactly 12.02"
Fold that in half and you can measure 6.01", and 3.005" (exactly). You get 1.5" for free, and can fairly accurately get exactly 1" by rolling the other 3" side into thirds.
If you want to get an exact 1", you can technically get there via 11"-8.5"-1.5", and that gives you the full imperial (fractional) measurement basis, all from folding a (presumably accurate) 8.5x11" piece of paper.
Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.
Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.
Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.
I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).
I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.
People do that all the time with US letter paper, print two to a sheet, you just end up with slightly wonky margins and usually everything being more like 40-45% the size it would be doubling up A4 paper. That use case isn't really hindered.
Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.
Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.
ANSI A (US letter) is a half sheet of ANSI B (ledger/tabloid) is a half sheet of C is a half sheet of D is a half sheet of E. When producing the paper, there is no waste of material or time, its the same process just starting with a slightly differently sized starting sheet (hypothetically; I am assuming that paper production has advanced beyond shaking screens of the largest handleable size by hand).
The difference is that ANSI A, C and E have aspect ratios of 17/22 (0.77) and ANSI B & D have aspect ratios of 11/17 (0.65), while all ISO sizes have aspect ratios of 1/sqrt(2) (0.71).
The waste comes in when scaling between adjacent sizes.
Going from A4 to A3, you can enlarge a document to 141% of the original size, and the margins will match.
Going from US letter to tabloid (ANSI A to B), the width of the paper is 129% larger and the height is 154% larger, so you can only enlarge your document to 129% the original size, and you have larger vertical margins, which is waste.
(But if you double it, from A to C, the problem goes away, because the aspect ratio is the same; so you can produce posters of multiple sizes, just not on every ANSI paper size at once.)
Regardless of the size of your printing sheet, you choose a page size that's based on dividing your printing sheet in half N number of times, typeset your document to that page size (which you can't even skip for ISO paper sizes, because you pick your font size independent of the paper sizes), print 2^N pages per printing sheet in a particular pattern, fold and/or cut the sheet up, and bind.
There's no difference in waste or time regardless of your paper size choices, unless you do something silly or artistic, like choosing to print a square book or some shape not derived from halving your paper size.
[^1]: This is fun! https://papersizes.io/us/
Not as a consumer. As a paper producer, you take advantage of it by cutting large sheets of paper in half to produce smaller sheets. Since you never sell any sizes that aren't clean multiples of each other like this, you've minimized the amount of paper you waste. That's the "advantage".
This was once the standard way of making paper; I don't know if it still is.
I’m sure you can do that on other size systems, but ISO paper sizing gives you accurate scaling.
Same goes for photocopies, photocopiers can scale copies so two A4 sheets copy to one, if you don’t need the same size.
This assumes there are no errors anywhere in the sizes or alignments of the A4 base page or either A5. Otherwise, you'll have an A5 running over an edge of the A4 or both A5s overlapping in the middle.
If your pages are designed with margins on the assumption that errors in the paper are common, this issue disappears because the margins cover for it. But still, if I wanted to do a display of two 8.5" x 11" sheets of paper, I'd want a board that was bigger than 17" x 11".
For commercial printing, there's the SRA paper series (Supplementary Raw) which is designed to accommodate bleed and alignment bars. An A4 glossy magazine, for example, might be printed on SRA3 and will be trimmed, folded, and stapled automatically at the end of the printing process. But that's a technical detail for the printer to care about - the publisher or designer might specify "folded A3 with bleeds", and the printer will choose the correct raw format to provide that within their printing system.
If you're manually aligning the sheets on the photocopier bed maybe, but the edges are set up for that so it's never been an issue for me. However every photocopier I've used that was made since the late 90s lets you do the sheets individually so you can use the copier bed to align each one.
Because the ability to scale like this is so ubiquitous we're just all used to doing it.
I never understood the US paper size system while living there (or since...!), don't get me started with feet and inches and 16'ths etc - ISO, metric and base10 is just so much more logical and easy to use...
Or you can buy a ream of legal-size and have a printshop slice it down (which is how I got ahold of B4 or B5 IIRC).
Heck, I’m pretty sure you could get a sheaf of it at any number of office supply stores right now if you wanted.
Unless you have mobile paper shops. Could be handy, but seems a bit niche.
I buy A4 notebooks all the time. I use fountain pens, so many of the notebooks and even loose paper with the proper sizing (coating, that is) usually come in EU sizes. Tomoe River... Clairfontaine... etc.
As regards metric/A* paper sizes, it seems like just a coincidence that this scheme resulted in a standard size that is useful for everyday documents, since it only works for powers of 2 and starts with the definition of 1 square meter. If a meter were 1.5x smaller or larger, then I don’t think there would be a standard size that works so well.
EDIT: Being curious about this, I did some more reading, and discovered there is a “B” series of paper sizes that maintain the same ratio relationship, but are exactly in between all the A sizes! That’s useful.
Take the length/weight relationship.
Definitionally, it'd be way more elegant for the unit of mass to be based on the unit of length directly, a cubic meter of something, but having your base unit of mass be a ton wasn't going to fly.
So they instead tried for 1/100th of the meter and landed on the gram, but it turns out they misjudged and now your standard unit of weight is the prefixed kilogram instead, because everyone used kilograms instead.
Which is to say, if you didn't get a pretty good paper size out of the definition used for A0, someone would have found a different definition which did produce a pretty good paper size, and then declare it was the only natural one.