Okay, rant time:
I’m certainly not the first to hit upon this, nor will I be the last, but for the love of all that is holy, can we agree what A6 is!?
So I understand different paper size standards evolved from different parts of the world - I’m fine with that. You’ve got those defined by ISO, ANSI, JIS, and others.
But I was recently looking at getting something printed, and I have an A5 Rhodia tablet and thought to myself: self, I’d like something just a little bit bigger for this project. So A6 “sounds” about right, right? Of course (and this is my own ignorance), the higher you go in the A series, the smaller the size. (Which is why one printer I think was scratching their head when I was describing the proposed layout and insightfully commented that there may not be much room left to write.)
That prompted me to dig deeper, through which I found this great website reference that has taken the painstaking steps to amalgamate these different standards into one place for reference (and even a little history and background). Here I was able to learn about my A6 mistake and better judge what would actually work.
But then, I was on another printer’s site on which they provided templates for different print job sizes, one of which is A9 with dimensions of 8.5" x 5.5". This is more in line with what I was thinking … but the actual ISO A9 is 1.5" x 2". Like, what is going on here? I’m sure there’s some deep explanation, of which I’m partly curious, but I fail to see the purposes of “standards” if everybody is just going to come up with their own definitions.
Phew … well at least that’s off my chest. Thank you gentle reader, and may your paper journeys be just a little less bumpy having now been equipped with this newfound knowledge.
