Jul 31 2010

Standard Paper Sizes

A lot of us are familiar with A4 size paper (some of us even remember Quarto and Foolscap), but what about the less common sizes. You will find them listed below in both metric and imperial:-

The ISO paper size concept

In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or equivalently cut one parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces, then the resulting page will have again the same width/height ratio.

Application examples

The ISO standard paper size system covers a wide range of formats, but not all of them are widely used in practice. Among all formats, A4 is clearly the most important one for daily office use. Some main applications of the most popular formats can be summarized as:

Untrimmed paper formats

All A and B series formats described so far are trimmed paper end sizes, i.e. these are the dimensions of the paper delivered to the user or reader. Other ISO standards define the format series RA and SRA for untrimmed raw paper, where SRA stands for "supplementary raw format A" ("sekundäres Rohformat A"). These formats are only slightly larger than the corresponding A series formats. Sheets in these formats will be cut to the end format after binding. The ISO RA0 format has an area of 1.05 m² and the ISO SRA0 format has an area of 1.15 m². These formats also follow the sqrt(2)-ratio and half-area rule, but the dimensions of the start format have been rounded to the full centimetre.

The common untrimmed paper formats that printers order from the paper manufacturers are: