[edw]

He sees a pattern _here_, not in the article. He's talking about the people _here_:

"It's too bad that the US didn't..."

"...its[sic] pretty asinine, ... and USA is stuck using obsolete..."

This has nothing to do with the metric system: You could define a hypothetical Z0 paper size as 42.81" x 30.27", a square yard, and then define paper sizes Z1, Z2, and so forth. Each would be half the area of the previous by performing the same operation. It's not as if 210 or 297 are particularly easy numbers to deal with, or that having precisely a square meter of material is all that important. Is it important that a sheet of A4 paper is about one eighth of a square meter?

And in defense of US Letter, its proportions are closer to the golden ratio than A4, which looks too skinny for me. But they're both too wide for letter writing; I think either octavo-sized or A5 paper is a more natural width for printing or hand-writing a single column of text. Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style – to mention one of a potential dozen or so authorities – recommends text columns be a maximum of about two alphabets of lowercase characters.

[jrockway]

I like A4 better than US Letter. Perhaps because it is "different".

[edw]

Back when I liked A4 more than US Letter, it was pretty much because I had a deep need to appear sophisticated by making conscious decisions to adopt exotic, European things. See also self-hating Americans who are against GMO and anything the US or any US company does because some Europeans are against it for political or economic – not aesthetic or scientific or otherwise relevant – reasons.

On another note, the original article writer spends a lot of time on paper sizing issues when resizing a PDF to fit on a different paper size is easy.