So what do they call an actual poached egg?
Nope; you can eat your sheep-dung ice-cream and wear neon-green mankinis until the cows come home, for all I care. With paper sizes, though, it’s a nuisance to produce documents formatted for two different sizes. This becomes a particular problem in the case of documents where the pagination is fixed, such as PDFs, forcing you to scale the document when printing, and have very large margins. It’s a common problem when receiving or sending documents to American clients; the printing goes all screwy on both ends. With documents that are repaginated when opened (such as Word documents) just opening the file on a different locale can completely screw up formatting, making related objects split across multiple pages and introducing blank pages because of page breaks.
Relax and ease off the coffee; it’s not about the Big Global Conspiracy to Take Over Your Life, it’s just much easier to work with a single paper standard when working globally. Your comparison to ice-cream and clothing is not really valid, since those don’t cause problems of the same sort.
Newsflash: words have multiple meanings. Look in particular at meanings 6 and 7: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sensible.
They don’t call them anything. It’s not commonly prepared that way.
What you in the US refer to as “legal paper” is called “foolscap” in the British Commonwealth countries. I don’t know about the Continent et al.
As a schoolboy in the late 1960s foolscap was the standard size of a ringbinder and the pad of paper. By the mid-70s A4 was making its mark and by 1980 was becoming standard.
I started legal practise in 1979 and don’t recall a lot of foolscap documents surviving by that time. We still prepared wills on goatskin foolscap which were sewn with green tape. All court documents were folded down in thirds. Leases and title deeds were also foolscap.
The march of progress and standardisation of photocopiers, typewriters, then computer printers, faxes etc through the 1980s saw foolscap disappear.
So I was delighted on a journey to the US to discover your legal sized paper was still fighting a rear-guard action against bland modernity. All power to you.
In truth I envy American lawyers their yellow legal pads which are a delight to write on and provide that extra space often needed when making notes. It doesn’t exist in New Zealand. Just bland white A4 blocks.
Personally I like the yellow and wish we had it here.
There is research which indicates black print on a yellow background is the easiest to read. Blue print works well on yellow too.
And no…of course I can’t find a reference. 
It’s hard to justify the cost of the conversion. Plus, if there were a debate on this in 2011, somebody would start a political party claiming that the bible uses feet and inches and that Mr. Obama’s trying to convert everybody to a Martian religion.
In Canada we use the same paper sizes as in the U.S., even though Canada adopted metric/SI around 1977.
I’m sure this gives somebody, somewhere, the impression that these paper sizes are a natural consequence of the structure of the universe…
From what I can see, legal size is still standard for all purposes in the Court of Quebec.
Hey, thanks for that! I’ve read the term “foolscap” several times when reading British authors, and via context I’ve always known it meant paper, but I mistakenly assumed it referred to a variety of paper, i.e. vellum, parchment, foolscap, etc. I didn’t realize it was the word for a specific size of the paper.
A4 … I like it. I ended up needing to buy it when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons and I found some custom-designed character sheets that were far superior to the default character sheet that comes in the back of the D&D Player’s Handbook. These custom sheets were designed by a guy in England, and were formatted for A4 paper. I had discovered that if I scaled them down to fit an 8.5" x 11" sheet, the type became uncomfortably small, and printing them on legal-sized paper just wasted a lot of space (and the paper hung out of my 3-ring binder). So I ordered a ream of A4 from a place I found online. I found the dimensions aesthetically pleasing.
Well, the aspect ratio is the square root of 2…
Well, of course you did…
They are nice for spreadsheets
Whoa! I don’t really get all that math, though, so I suppose I may have simply been picking up on this “silver ratio” subconsciously.
My experience exactly. It’s going out of style, but it’s still used occasionally. As far as I can tell, only in real estate deals.
IANAL, but I do work in the document services department of a large (2,000+ lawyers) law firm. So I probably see more legal documents than most lawyers.
Huh. I thought converting A4 to letter (and vice versa) would be easy. Both of the discrepancies are within the usual margin range.
And only because I’ll never find another place on the boards to stick this in: Did you ever wonder why your ream (500 sheets) of 20 lb. paper didn’t weigh 20 pounds? It’s because the weight of the paper is taken from the basis of the paper, in this case a 500 sheet load of 18 x 23 inch leafs. That weighs 20 pounds. When it’s trimmed down into a quarter of that size for finish you have a ream of 20 lb. office paper.
Right you are. And just to add to the confusion, the basis weight size is not the same for all kinds of paper. 20# bond is about the same thickness as 50# book (I forget the basis size for that).
Don’t you start with paper that’s 17x22, not 18x23, and then quarter it to get four 8.5x11 sheets?
You would if the sheets had finished edges. My guess is that even when I was working with paper (25+ years ago) production sizes were even larger, anyway. But as I understood it at the time basis sheets were rough-cut and then trimmed to final size, hence the 1/2 inch selvage loss around the edges. For all I know they use lasers today to trim to final size and have nearly zero waste, but like I said [del]I’m a geezer[/del] it’s been a while.
Thank you. I’ve been wondering how the perfect dimensions of A4 et al. worked. I wondered why they wouldn’t have edges that had to be trimmed off, thus eschewing the one advantage they have.
Who uses paper any more?