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Article #622Re: ISO paper sizes
From: Lawrence Crowl
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1993 05:00
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1993 05:00
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In article <1993Jan4.170125.3951@infodev.cam.ac.uk> ag129@cus.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant) writes: >1 SI inch is [25.4 mm] _exactly_, not just to 7 decimal places. >But the people who don't use ISO paper sizes don't use SI inches >either, they use NIST inches, which differ from SI inches well before >the 8th decimal place. (I don't know the exact details - after all, >why should I know about American internal standards?) The official and legal measure system for the United States is, and has been since the 19th century, the metric system. (Little known fact, I forget exactly where I read it.) The US "imperial" system was defined in terms of the metric system. In this definition, 39.37 inches are defined to be exactly 1 meter (metre). If you invert this, you get 25.400050800101603 mm to the inch. I do not know why the SI definition of an inch was changed from the long-standing US definition. I believe it was changed sometime around 1960. -- Lawrence Crowl 503-737-2554 Computer Science Department crowl@cs.orst.edu Oregon State University ...!hplabs!hp-pcd!orstcs!crowl Corvallis, Oregon, 97331-3202
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!gatech!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!cbnewsm!cbnewsl!att-out!rutgers!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!jade.CS.ORST.EDU!crowl From: crowl@jade.CS.ORST.EDU (Lawrence Crowl) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: ISO paper sizes Message-ID: <1idp0qINNa91@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU> Date: 6 Jan 93 05:00:10 GMT References: <1i9j4gEINN8nd@uni-erlangen.de> <1993Jan4.170125.3951@infodev.cam.ac.uk> Organization: Computer Science Department, Oregon State University Lines: 23 NNTP-Posting-Host: jade.cs.orst.edu