I’ve just spent a half an hour researching paper sizes. Who’d have thought there was an international standard paper size? Who’d have thought it wasn’t letter-sized paper?
Well, this webpage set me straight on the matter.
I knew there was something callled “A4,” which as far as I could tell in Microsoft Word was almost exactly the same size as letter-sized paper. Except that it’s not. We’re off by millimeters.
Millimeters!
Published by Allyn
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
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Why do think MS Word’s habit of defaulting to ‘letter’ is deeply irritating? 😉
Well, it’s not deeply irritating to me. 😉 After all, it’s not like I can go in the store and buy A4 paper right off the shelf on this side of the pond.
As far as Word goes, couldn’t you select your page size as A4 in a blank document, and then save that as your default template? That way, the next time you open word it won’t default to letter. I’m not sure if that will work, but it should work.
Why r u reseraching paper sizes anyway?
I was using MS-Word’s scaling feature to shrink manuscript pages, leaving the original pagination and formatting intact but giving me extra-wide margins on right and bottom to make revision notes. Only, rather than offer the choice of a percentage-scale, MS-Word offers the choice of other paper sizes–A4, A5, legal, letter, envelope breadthwise or lengthwise–so I needed to know what these other paper sizes were and if they would do what I needed. It turned out that scaling from letter to A5 and printing the result on letter-sized paper did precisely the trick.