Digital BW, The Print

Tom,

The whole world, apart from USA and Canada, uses the ISO paper sizes, not 
just UK and Europe.

They are basically the German DIN standards from 1922, which were adopted by 
most countries such as Belgium (1924), Netherlands (1925), Norway (1926), 
Switzerland (1929), Sweden (1930), Soviet Union (1934), Hungary (1938), 
Italy (1939), Uruguay (1942), Argentina and Brazil (1943), Spain (1947), 
Austria (1948), Romania (1949), Japan (1951), Denmark and Czechoslovakia 
(1953), Israel and Portugal (1954), Yugoslavia (1956), India and Poland 
(1957), United Kingdom (1959), Venezuela (1962), New Zealand (1963), Iceland 
(1964), Mexico (1965), South Africa (1966), France/Peru/Turkey (1967), Chile 
(1968), Greece/Simbabwe/Singapur (1970), Bangladesh (1972), Thailand and 
Barbados (1973), Australia and Ecuador (1974), Columbia and Kuwait (1975). 
In 1975 it became an international ISO standard.

The practical and aesthetic advantages of the sqrt(2) aspect ratio for these 
paper sizes were apparently first noted by the physics professor Georg 
Lichtenberg in 1786.

An article which describes the standards and discusses the history of the 
ISO standards and the American standards is 
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html. That is where I got the 
above, and the history stuff is about halfway down the article - headed 
'History of the ISO paper formats' and followed by the history of the USA 
formats. Quite interesting.

Bob Frost.



 ----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom OConnell" <tomoc@...>


There must be some interesting explanation about how and why England
and Europe use A4 etc. paper and US uses Letter sized (and other
sizes).

How and why did they get different standards.