A4 report

[Joshua Langman]

If A4 or 8.5 x 11 was a reasonable size page for continuous text, it wouldn't be impossible to find a novel printed at this size.

[Té Rowan]

It night have something to do with novels rarely being office supplies.

[Nick Shinn]

Letters were often smaller.
It depends how much you had to say.
Typewriters could type on many sizes, even envelopes and very very long pieces of paper.

[hrant]

But it's the width that's the problem. And to save on carriage returns people would naturally have used the widest paper that would fit in a typewriter. So: I wonder how/when such a width was standardized. I'm guessing it had to do with what width of object humans are comfortable moving around.

hhp

[JamesM]

Here's an article by the American Forest and Paper Association on why 8.5 x 11 became standard in the U.S.

http://afandpa.org/paper.aspx?id=511

According to the article, the origins were in the 1600's when it was a convenient size for Dutch paper maker. By the early 1900s there were 2 common sizes in the U.S. — 8.5 x 11 and 8.5 x 10.5. It wasn't until the 1980's that the U.S. government declared 8.5 x 11 to be the standard size here for government printing.

[hrant]

From the article:

The average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms was 44". Many molds at that time were around 17" front to back because the laid lines and watermarks had to run from left to right. Sounds big?...well to maximize the efficiency of paper making, a sheet this big was made, and then quartered, forming four 8.5" x 11" pieces.

There you go. Just like typefaces suffer because we still want to believe in handwriting, typography suffers because of what some guys could lug around.

And:

they stuck with the same size so as to keep the hand made paper makers in business.

Yeah, money is more important than reading... Some things never change (these days text taking a back seat to movin' pitchurz).

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Sheet size has some bearing on trimmed page size, but for your concern, which seems to be immersive reading of longer documents, sheets larger than page size are generally used, then folded and trimmed.

I’ve often designed booklets which were printed on A4/8½ x 11" stock, then folded and trimmed.

It’s unfair to blame a size that is suitable for all-purpose uses in offices and job printing, for being misused in one particular kind of document.

[hrant]

But that one particular kind of document (a single column of text spanning a large number of pages) constitutes the lion's share of how Letter/A4 paper is used. So maybe 90% of that "all-purpose use" is in fact flawed because the paper is too wide. Because people wanted to save money by maximally accommodating laborers' physical attributes. Torso width + arm length shouldn't have dictated what our reading "firmware" gets to resolve.

Folding? Takes time/effort, so few people do it.

hhp

[McBain_v1]

This has proven extremely illuminating for me, as I often have to deal with large reports (Environmental Statements) from consultants that are always set on A4 paper. The range of fonts is quite restricted and limited to those that come with the standard installation of Office 2003 / 2007 or 2010.

My latest challenge is to prepare a handout that will accompany a 45 minute presentation on "Renewable Energy and the Planning System". I was going to go with the standard portrait alignment, 2 columns. The handout will not be a repeat of the presentation, rather a complimentary mini-document that will expand on some of the points raised.

Without wishing to be detrimental to English Heritage (which was the organisation that appeared on the pages of those excellent close-up photographs of the Gill Sans text), I have to read a lot of that organisation's output and it is turgid stuff! Nice to find out that at least someone has an interest in making the content appear more readable and presentable.

[Joshua Langman]

With only slightly more effort, you can also fold your A4 paper in half, in the style of playbills or chapbooks, to produce a more reader-friendly single-column layout.

[Edit — I see Nick already mentioned that.]

[JamesM]

> you can also fold your A4 paper in half

That can be a good option, but for a multipage piece keep in mind that 1) it'll need to be saddle stitched (stapled on the fold) and 2) the pages need to be resequenced prior to printing. For example, on a 20-page saddle-stitched piece, page 4 and page 17 are printed side by side on the same sheet of paper, but appear in the correct sequence after it is bound and folded. A good print shop can take can care of this for you, but a small copy shop might require you to resequence the pages yourself before printing.

[Nick Shinn]

“Book” faces are best for wide measure, with generous size and leading, because they have the fine detail that mitigates clumsiness at the large size necessary for long lines. However, they look like literature, which is so wrong for corporate/bureaucratic reports.

11 pt. Gills Sans Light is a good response to the problem discussed here, and it meets accessibility requirements, size-wise, even if the execution in the document shown above isn’t ideal.

Can one font work equally well for a printed document, and the PDF version of it, read on screen?

How about an app that changes font according to the medium?
That would be a similar trick to automated optical scaling.
Alternatively, just have two versions of the document, one for print, one for screen.

I guess this will become less of an issue with higher res screens.

[Joshua Langman]

"For example, on a 20-page saddle-stitched piece, page 4 and page 17 are printed side by side on the same sheet of paper, but appear in the correct sequence after it is bound and folded."

If you're using a real typography program, it will do this for you. And even in a word processing program, it's fairly easy to get this right just by making a blank mockup, numbering the pages, and then pulling it apart to see what pages end up next to each other. The next challenge is getting it to print right on a single-sided office printer. Even that just takes a bit of trial and error.

I have seen, and been responsible for, plenty of playbills etc that were typed up in Word, imposed manually, and printed one side at a time on a desktop printer. I think it's nearly always worth the effort.

[JamesM]

> If you're using a real typography program, it will do this for you.

Yep, some programs will do that.

> it's fairly easy to get this right just by making
> a blank mockup, numbering the pages...

It's a straightforward process but can be confusing for someone who doesn't do it frequently.

> I think it's nearly always worth the effort.

I agree complete; just want to make sure the original poster realizes there are some extra steps involved.

[geraintf]

By way of a coda to the thread, here is the final report:
http://research.english-heritage.org.uk/report/?15107

As you can see, I failed to persuade my bosses to let me try Charter or otherwise amend the format. But I did use the book cut of GSL, which has a more sturdy appearance.

Thanks to all who contributed,

Geraint