Talk:Paper size

korean paper

A secondly interessting thing to mention is the koreean paper. I will come back withe link. Korean paper from 1700on is manufactured from tree-coating and China had said its great import quality had misled people confusing it with silk. A documentary on paper was also on air but in outside Europe countries the stte television apppies censrship & wasn`t able to find refferences on thickness of paper_external silk road website-188.25.49.173 (talk) 14:13, May 31,Bogdan

Notional area

@Stephan Leeds: Why is it "notional"? I can't see how it is any more notional than the linear dimensions. Thanks incidentally for adding this info which seems sensible, though I worry about the width of the table (particularly as so many people now view the web through a keyhole). Imaginatorium (talk) 09:04, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

With decimal inches, it’s now also inconsistent with other tables in this article that are using {{size}}. — Christoph Päper 11:52, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

The formulaic dimensions are only notional because the sizes in the standard are all defined in whole millimeters (and tolerances) approximating the formula, not the real numbers resulting from the formula. (That is, some dimensions that agree with the formula and the tolerances are outside the bounds dictated by the standard’s explicit whole-millimeter dimensions and tolerances.) I’m bothered by the table width too and am not of a strong opinion that including this information is a compelling choice given the awkwardness and the template bug (mentioned below); I am of the moderate opinion that it’s better and hope the issues can be mitigated by people who are better with charts and templates than I.

I won’t think it wrong if this change is reverted, but I did think the basis of the dimensions the standard provides should be included. The change in notation is due to a bug. I didn’t find the exact criteria for when it’s manifested, but changes in the table outside {{size}}—which should be unrelated—apparently caused it to produce terrible forms like “1+1/2”, and the only workaround I found was the major kludge of abandoning {{size}} in favor of manual redundant data entry and {{convert}} and switching to decimal output.

It’s a mess, but I’m hoping someone else can improve on it rather than have to revert to fix the problems, and I see it’s already better than I left it. Stephan Leeds (talk) 22:10, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

@Stephan Leeds:: thanks for your efforts on this. Several points:

• I now see what you mean by notional. (But I am used to the term, and surely many are not.) But I think it would be better just to write "Area", with a footnote, something like: "Since the dimensions are rounded to millimetres, this notional area (in the geometrical series) differs slightly from the value calculated by the specification"
• I suggest reducing the size of the area column: currently we have "2^-n = 1/p" where p=2^n; I think many people will find negative powers confusing, so I suggest replacing this with "1/2^n".
• Frankly I think the bottom "algebraic" link would be better removed, as there is a lot less here than meets the eye. If really wanted, first, i should be n. Then the expressions for the base length are really confusing. (I had to rewrite them to even see that they are correct.) This is a logarithmic scale, and the values are 2^1/4, 2^1//2, and 2^3/8. The last is equal to eighth-root-of-8, but this latter has, I suggest, zero explanatory force.
• The last sentence, beginning "This interesting arrangement..." deserves a hatchet job.

Please comment. I have not made any changes, partly because I am lazy, partly because it's much more efficient to agree what we want to do first. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:47, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

I’m good with all of that, but I didn’t do most of what’s mentioned above. On the negative (and fractional) exponents, that was a change (that I thought was quite nice) from my notation using the radical symbol.

I spent way too much time on that thing already and would be very pleased if someone would continue the effort. Stephan Leeds (talk) 05:12, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Reverting ref to ANSI blog

‎I reverted an IP's edit with summary: "Standardized American paper sizes. Comparison against ISO sizes was bias in assuming the base had no--arbitrary--reasoning behind it while ANSI claims it was to reduce waste." This misses the point. Apparently (the ANSI blog tells us) the original "Letter" paper size was chosen as way (somehow?) to save waste. But this does not mean that they carefully chose a 17:11 aspect ratio for a particular reason. (Perhaps it was all to do with standard sizes of large paper sheets.) Whereas the 1:√2 ratio was chosen specifically to make half-sheets the same shape. In these terms, the 17:11 ratio is entirely arbitrary. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:01, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

JIS tolerances

The article writes, "The JIS A-series is identical to the ISO A-series except that it has slightly different tolerances." However, I've noticed that since 2019, this seems to formally not be the case. https://kikakurui.com/p/index.html lists 2 articles for JISP0138:1998, that based on using machine translation seem to say that the tolerances are identical to what Wikipedia lists for ISO 216, and notes that they have "harmonized" the standard for tolerances in the second article. There's also a number of web pages pre-dating 2019 that list tolerances for JIS P 0138 that are identical to ISO 216, so I'm guessing while it wasn't official it was just easier for companies to adopt the same standard as ISO for a while now. Anyways, can someone source a more official location for the JIS P 0138 documents? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.249.80.247 (talk) 05:07, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Nearly duplicate diagrams

I noticed the page has two diagrams that are almost duplicates--one that illustrates A sizes in comparison with US sizes at the top, and one that illustrates A sizes alone in the A series section. At first I was thinking of removing the one that has just the A sizes and moving the A sizes with comparison in its place since it has more information, but now I'm thinking that the one with just A sizes needs to be where it is, since the US sizes are just for comparison and not part of the A series. Anyone have any ideas how to make this better, or is it already good as it is? Zidane2k1 (talk) 16:56, 11 April 2024 (UTC)