Weird paper size issue - Mexico Oficio / Imperial Foolscap

[Leo Enticknap]

I've been sent a ton of documentation from an Asian-based manufacturer in PDF form related to an install. Because reading from a laptop screen is not easy or practical where I'm going to be, I've been trying to print it out.

I have no idea why this has been done, but according to Acrobat, the page size of the PDFs I've been sent is Mexico Oficio, which is 8.5 x 13.5 inches. If I "letterbox" the pages to regular US letter size (8.5 x 11), the result is text and diagrams that I really struggle to read, even with glasses (though I realize that I need to find the time to see an ophthalmologist for a new prescription, but that's another story).

So I searched on Amazon for Mexico Oficio paper, and found bugger all. Nothing. They don't sell it, period. Given that this stuff is presumably in use less than 150 miles from where I am sitting, I find this a little surprising. After some more Googleizing, I discovered something else surprising: the Mexico Oficio paper size is the same as the ancient British "Foolscap Imperial" sheet, which I vaguely remember from my childhood in England in the 1970s, before the UK joined what is now the EU and it was replaced by A4 in the wake of that.

Even more Googleizing later, I discovered a likely answer to my question above. The American "legal" sheet is 8.5 x 14, meaning that I can print a Mexico Oficio PDF on it without any letterboxing and shrinkage. This paper is widely available, my printer can take it, and I've just ordered a ream; so the immediate problem is solved.

But a question remains: how on earth did a standard dreamed up by the British Empire become adopted by, and presumably remains in current usage in Mexico?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Try printing them on legal size paper instead. Click the fit to size box and it should come out very close. My Brother Laser Jet will do that. Otherwise take the files to Office Max or similar store that has the big $30,000 laser jets. They may print your required image size to the next standard size (Tabloid...11X17) and trim off a little excess on two sides.

[Leo Enticknap]

As noted above, US Legal is the same width as Oficio but half an inch longer, so that will work. What intrigues me is the history behind why Mexico came to use, and still uses, a technical standard with its origins in Britsh Empire bureaucracy (Foolscap Folio = 8.5" x 13.5"). Given the Spanish influence, I would have expected them to have gone metric during the late C19 to early C20 (the original definition of a meter was a fraction of a distance with Barcelona at one end of it), and therefore to use ISO 216 paper sizes today. But while there seems to be plenty of Oficio available south of the border...

image.png

...I don't see any ISO "A" paper sizes for sale on that site.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Didn't most of Mexico's standards come from the Spaniards though, as they are part of Europe? In that case it makes sense... Otherwise hard to say why they chose that...

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm guessing the Imperial Foolscap Folio standard took hold in Spain and then Mexico simply because of what was available. I think the British and Dutch had the biggest paper-making industries 400-500 years ago when the standards were first developed. IIRC, the metric system didn't start gaining popularity until the 1800's.

Old standards die hard. Americans are still rocking the old imperial system for units of measure, even for our paper sizes. Most Americans wouldn't know what you're talking about if you mentioned "A4" for a page size. When I was a kid I remember there being a big push in the US to adopt the metric system. The effort failed badly. People resisted the change. This is probably the same reason why Mexico Oficio is still popular as a paper size standard.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Here in Tucson, we have one freeway that is "calibrated" in km. It is US19, which heads from here to Mexico. And exit numbers are also based on km.

Back to Cinema, subtitle size is measured in points where there are 72 points to an inch. The projected subtitle is scaled as though the screen was 11 inches high.

[Bobby Henderson]

Technically speaking Interstate 19 is what runs South from Tucson down to Nogales. US-19 is on the East side of the country, starting in St Petersburg, FL and running up to Erie, PA (ending at US-20). But, yeah, I-19 does have kilometer-based exits, sign posts and distance signs. However, the speed limit signs on I-19 are still set in miles per hour. Sorry, I can't help being a road geek.

Back to Cinema, subtitle size is measured in points where there are 72 points to an inch. The projected subtitle is scaled as though the screen was 11 inches high.

Points is not a good unit of measure for text displayed on an electronic screen. Points is rooted in page layout methods for print. It's fine there when you have a printed page set up with points and picas as the units of measure and are using a layout grid based on the same thing.

The problem with lettering sized in points for electronic screens and other non-print mediums is the points value is not the physical size of the letter. It's the size of an invisible Em box around the letter. And the size of that box can change from one typeface to the next.

When I design signs I typically size the letters according to the physical size of a capital letter and position the letter according to its baseline and cap height line. If I design some graphics to display on a LED-based "jumbotron" I size the cap letter height in whole pixel values and align the baseline with the pixel grid. The lettering ends up looking noticeably more legible.

For subtitles they probably should do the same thing. Size cap letters in whole pixel values and align them with the pixel grid.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Thanks for the clarification on 19! It's all highways to me!

As I recall from my work on the SMPTE subtitle committee, the "point size" of text is the distance from the baseline of one line of text to the baseline of the next line of horizontal text with tightly packed text (no leading). The actual bounding box size is smaller than this (so the lines do not run into each other). Since subtitles use standard OpenType font files, I think they pretty much had to so stuff based on point size and adapt it to screen size. It gets interesting for vertical text (like Japanese). There, instead of the advance width used in horizontal text, there is an advance height that is the distance from the vertical origin of one glyph to the next (below it). But font compressors used in subtitle production remove vertical metrics, so subtitle rendering devices do not know how far apart to space the glyphs. Instead of using the advance height, they use some arbitrary distance between the glyph bounding boxes. This results in the Japanese equivalent of "111" looking like a Japanese "3" on the screen. I wanted the standard to say "obey the font file," but I could not get the rest of the group to agree... Then I retired...

Oh, and the position of each subtitle line is based on percent of screen height or width. Most commonly, the vertical position of a line of text is the percentage screen height of the horizontal baseline from the bottom of the screen. The vertical position can reference the top, bottom, or center of the screen. The horizontal position references the left side, right side, or center of the screen in percentage of screen width. These use the edge of the text line bounding box for reference (though I think that for left align, they should use the horizontal origin of the leftmost character, for right align, the origin of the last character plus its advance width, and for center, the horizontal origin of the first character and the origin of the last plus its advance width).

So... I know enough about font files and typography to be dangerous!

Harold

[Randy Stankey]

Americans are still rocking the old imperial system for units of measure, even for our paper sizes.

I just don't understand what the big deal is with units of measure. I am a unit agnostic. I don't care what measurement system you use as long as you are consistent. Whether you want to work in feet or meters, I don't care. Just tell me what system you're working in. Ounces? Grams? Drams and scruples? It doesn't make much difference to me as long as you tell me.

If you don't know that there are eight furlongs to a mile or twenty four scruples to an ounce, that's your problem, not mine. Many English system units are divided by units of twelve which makes them much easier to calculate. There are three scruples in a dram and eight drams to an ounce, making twenty four scruples to the ounce. It doesn't matter whether you're talking fluid ounces or avdp.

Different units make sense in different situations. If you're a chemist, liters and kilos make sense. If you've got a cartload of apples, bushels make sense. (There are eight gallons to the bushel.) If you are at a horse race, furlongs would be the right choice. (Eight furlongs to the mile.)

I think it is insane for people to think that everybody must use the same units of measure for everything, all the time! It doesn't matter! Just be consistent!

https://youtu.be/vZlXd2Rf6pk?si=qR05EKWQ1i5aHGaF&t=16

[Leo Enticknap]

I think the British and Dutch had the biggest paper-making industries 400-500 years ago when the standards were first developed.

That would explain it. Even though the British and the Spanish were at war with each other at the time these standards emerged and gained traction, when needs must, and all that. Hence, also, the Soviets using 35mm, 4-perf pulldown as their film standard as well, despite it having been invented by one of the biggest capitalist boogeymen (as Lenin and Stalin would have seen him) of them all.

I was raising this mainly out of a long held curiosity about weights, measures, and technical standards: how they are born, used widely, and then die.

I just don't understand what the big deal is with units of measure

It's when they get politicized and weaponized. As examples from our own industry, the French Resistance used 17.5mm film to distribute propaganda movies, because the format never sold well outside France, and they figured it would fly under the radar of the Nazis. Likewise, China and 8.75mm. You couldn't run a Super 8 print on one of these projectors, so no risk of western propaganda finding its way into village halls in rural China. A more infamous example came in the '80s (after a few slugs of Bell's, I suspect), when Maggie Thatcher expressed the fear that further integration with the EU would result in Britain bring forced to re-do all its road signs in kilometers, and play Wagner on the public address systems in railway stations!

Anyways, my ream of US Legal arrived today, and I'll get printing those schematics over the weekend...

Different units make sense in different situations.

Couldn't agree more. For tiny distances, millimeters seem natural and intuitive to me. I can eyeball the difference between a 2.5mm and a 3mm Allen (the two sizes of hex head used in a Barco Series 2 projector) immediately and instinctively. I couldn't do that with 3/16 compared to 1/8. But when thinking about the distance between Loma Linda and downtown LA, for example, 66 miles seems natural. If you gave me the figure in kilometers, I'd have to convert it in order to get a sense of how long it would take me to make the journey.

[Randy Stankey]

It's funny about those film gauges. The French, 17.5 mm gauge is exactly half the width of 35 mm film and the Chinese, 8.75 mm gauge is exactly half the width of the French, 17.5 mm gauge. Both of them could be made by slitting 35 mm film into halves or quarters. Theoretically, a roll of existing film could be used to make one of the smaller gauges, giving you one half or one quarter the width and twice or four times the length. The practicality of actually doing that is up in the air. It might be better, faster and cheaper to manufacture those films from the ground up. However, the genesis of those non-standard film gauges seems clear to me.

I have some old movie cameras that use film in the "Double-8" format. The raw stock film is 16 mm wide but the image aperture only uses half the width. The user loads a fresh roll of film, uses it till the end then swaps the payout and take up reels which flips the film over to photograph on the previously unused half of the film. When sent to Kodak for processing, they develop the film normally, as if it was 16 mm film then split it down the middle and send you back two rolls of 8 mm film.

This all begs the question: Why are 35 mm and 16 mm film the standards?

As I understand it, 16 mm was chosen because it cannot be made by slitting 35 mm in half. At the time 16 mm film was devised, 35 mm film was still being made on nitrate stock. 16 mm was chosen to prevent untrained people from cutting down 35 mm nitrate film and using it in residential settings without proper fire safety measures in place. 35 mm film was meant to be the "professional" format for movie theaters and 16 mm film was meant to be the "amateur" format for use in homes and other places outside of theaters. Both formats were designed so that never the twain shall meet.

So? What about 35 mm film? That's an even more apocryphal story! It comes from one of my old books on film, the title of which I don't remember but I suppose I could try to look it up if I need to.

As the story goes, George Eastman played a part in the decision to make movie film 35 mm wide. When he was, first, designing movie film, he used sheets of glass for casting plates which were taken from the windows of his house and progressively cut them into halves, quarters and so on until he came upon a size that he thought convenient. 35 mm is only 0.002 in. more than 1-3/8 in. So, apparently, if the story is true, the windows in George Eastman's house must have been some multiple of 1-3/8" wide.

There's an old joke that asks why were the NASA Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters made to the the size they were.

It is said that one of the main considerations for the size of the rocket boosters was to fit them on a railroad flatcar so they could be transported from the factory to the launch site. The size of a railroad flatcar is said to be based upon the gauge between the rails and the gauge between the rails was supposed to have been based upon the distance between a pair of old horse wagon wheels. The size of a wagon was supposed to be the width that two horses could walk, side by side.

So, there you have it! The Space Shuttle was built by a horse's ass!

[Harold Hallikainen]

Several years ago, I did a presentation to a non-technical, non-cinema group on Cinema technology. It's at https://bh.hallikainen.org/uploads/h...n%20Cinema.pdf . According to my research at the time, 35 mm film was used for motion pictures in 1895. 70 mm was used in 1896 for better image quality and "to avoid Edison patents."