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Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

> There is no way to get a proper layout done

This is puzzling - how do you explain the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with this whatsoever?

Finally: I have seen lots and lots of A4 books, but they're simply not as common. It probably does help to live in Europe in that regard.

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I suspect the explanation is similar to the explanation of the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with US paper standards whatsoever, namely, that it's just paper, and most people don't have particularly strict usage constraints, so they just use what they have and it works fine.

Are you a bookmaker? The are the ones with the problems. ;)

> I have seen lots and lots of A4 books

And they all have suboptimal layouts.

> And they all have suboptimal layouts.

(my emphasis)

My question would be - would you be willing to ascribe that to taste?

No. Try to layout a document on A4 while maintaining at least basic standard rules (e.g. lines of 8-12 words, a pretty text body layout, e.g. a "nice ratio" like 3/4 or 1/2, with standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom). Since your font size will either be 11 or 12 pt on A4 because otherwise you use less than half of the paper or your font is really huge, you're not left with many options.

All of this is voodoo that you learned working with your preferred aspect ratio and size. None of these rules have any kind of objective basis.

I wouldn't be so hasty to dismiss hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of aesthetic tweaking by experts as voodoo simply to defend a page size and proportion whose primary advantage is not aesthetic but function.

None of that makes much sense to me, to be honest.

I find it curious that you just say:

> standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom

No units, which makes me assume you're talking inches... Perhaps your problem is that you also need to switch to metric? ;-)

No units because its all about proportions. E.g. the bottom margin is "double" so it can accommodate page numbers and set the text body on the "horizon".

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