Re: [css3-page] Additional page sizes

> On 02 Nov 2015, at 06:11, Liam Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2015-10-31 06:24, Florian Rivoal wrote:
>> CSS-Page supports a short list of predefined paper/page sizes for the
>> size property http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/#page-size-prop
>> A5, A4, A3, B5, B4, letter, legal, ledger
>> The B4 and B5 sizes included are very confusing for Japanese users, as
>> they are defined as ISO B4 (250×353mm) and ISO B5 (176×250mm),
>> different from the JIS-B4 (257×364mm) and JIS-B5 (182×257mm) commonly
>> used in Japan.
>> I suggest adding JIS-B4 and JIS-B5 to the list,
> 
> +1
> 
>> as well as ISO-B4 and
>> ISO-B5 as aliases to B4 and B5 for clarity.
> I'm not in favour of this unless its worded as "implementations must also accept...",
> because a drop-down list with all the ISO sizes prefixed by ISO would be quite irritating, especially for US and Canada people who'd have to scroll past them all to get to US Letter, US Legal and US Tabloid.  :-)

So we'd bias in favor of ISO against JIS for the prefix-less name. On the one hand, many more countries use ISO than JIS, but on the other hand, the B series (JIS) is common in Japan, and I am not sure it is elsewhere. I had at least never heard of it in France.

>> There are many more paper formats we could consider, and for instance
>> Antenna House supports the following
>> http://www.antennahouse.com/product/ahf60/docs/ahf-ext.html#axf.size
>> I would support extending the list in the specification in that
>> direction, but resolving the ambiguity and confusion with regards to
>> the B series seems higher priority.
> 
> Envelope sizes are worth including (in North America especially "envelope #10"), but once you get beyond the sizes that come in printer description files it's generally easier for people to specify sizes in inches/mm/feet/metres (e.g. for a large poster printed on a 4'-wide inkjet). There are whole series like SRA (e.g. SRA4, SRA3) and ANSI variants such as A3+ / Super B / B+) for printing with bleed and/or crop marks and colour lines.

I'd punt on envelopes for now (and maybe forever), for a few reasons:

- Envelopes often have windows, making it a complicated format (not simply a rectangle)
- Window positions vary per country, even for the same overall envelope size, causing an explosion of variants.
- Most other paper formats where you can print to the edge of the paper by printing on a larger sheet of paper into the bleed area and then cutting. Typically with envelopes you cannot do that, and there is an unprintable margin whose width depends on the equipment used.

All in all, when working with envelopes, you're often unlikely to get anything useful out of a standard size. You need to know which sub-variant of the standard size, and which printing equipment is being used, and specify physical sizes yourself.

> A shorter list is more helpful in a UI,

True.

> and the AH one seems a little arbitrary,

I think some in the list do make sense (e.g. "Hagaki", the standard Japan post card size, used for personal and commercial communication), but this is probably a fairly subjective choice, and I don't have data to suggest an objective list.

 - Florian

Received on Monday, 2 November 2015 14:34:41 UTC