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Concept
Paper size
Summary
Paper size standards govern the size of sheets of paper used as writing paper, stationery, cards, and for some printed documents.
The ISO 216 standard, which includes the commonly used A4 size, is the international standard for paper size. It is used across the world except in North America and parts of Central and South America, where North American paper sizes such as "Letter" and "Legal" are used. The international standard for envelopes is the C series of ISO 269.
ISO 216
The international paper size standard is ISO 216. It is based on the German DIN 476 standard for paper sizes. Each ISO paper size is one half of the area of the next larger size in the same series. ISO paper sizes are all based on a single of the square root of 2, or approximately 1:1.41421. There are different series, as well as several extensions.
The following international paper sizes are included in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): A3, A4, A5, B4, B5.
There are 11 sizes in the A series, designated A0–A10, all of which have an aspect ratio of , where a is the long side and b is the short side.
Since A series sizes share the same aspect ratio they can be scaled to other A series sizes without being distorted, and two sheets can be reduced to fit on exactly one sheet without any cutoff or margins.
The A0 base size is defined as having an area of 1 m^2; given an aspect ratio of , the dimensions of A0 are:
by .
or, rounded to the nearest millimetre, .
A series sizes are related in that the smaller dimension of a given size is the larger dimension of the next smaller size, and folding an A series sheet in half in its larger dimension—that is, folding it in half parallel to its short edge—results in two halves that are each the size of the next smaller A series size. As such, a folded brochure of a given A-series size can be made by folding sheets of the next larger size in half, e.g. A4 sheets can be folded to make an A5 brochure. The fact that halving a sheet with an aspect ratio of results in two sheets that themselves both have an aspect ratio of is proven as follows:
where a is the long side and b is the short side.
Official source
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