What's the best documentation size?

[P E Smee]

In article <5923 at crdgw1.crd.ge.com> kassover at jupiter.crd.ge.com (David Kassover) writes:
>
>Our British (and European) distributor reformats our documents
>onto A4 (I think.)  it's about 8x12 inches, and he uses a plastic
>spiral binding.  Looks good, once you get used to it.

Proper official A4 is 210x297 mm (8.27x11.69 inches).  Cut in half
gives A5, 148x210 mm.  (The theory is that it is based on A0, which has
an area of one square meter and sides in the ratio of 1 to square-root
of 2.  Cut in half gives A1, with the sides in the same ratio.  Halve
again for A2, and so on.  There's also a B series, less often used,
with same aspect ratio but based on B0 which is 1 meter on the short
side -- 1000x1414 mm.)

'Computer paper' A4 is a very close approximation, 8-1/4 by 11-2/3
inches, so that a 6 lpi printer will take an integral number of
line-throws per page (70).  

My REAL reason for mentioning all this is so I can plead with software
documenters -- if you are producing preformatted documents which are
going to be distributed on magnetic media, for the user to print out,
PLEASE indicate end of page with a FORM FEED rather than by filling out
with blank lines.  Then the page boundaries will come out right on both
US 8.5x11, and European A4 lineprinter paper.  (The 1/4 inch difference
in width is not usually significant with normal margins.)  It's REALLY
BORING having to edit a document to stop it from crawling up the paper
at 4 lines per page.  (Or down 4 lines per page if the doc was
formatted for A4 and you're using US paper.)

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee at bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132