A Tokyo trip report [LWN.net]

A Tokyo trip report

Posted Jul 19, 2007 11:04 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774)
In reply to: A Tokyo trip report by nim-nim
Parent article: A Tokyo trip report

> given how anglo-saxon countries (and the US-centric computer industry) resist the metric system most of the world uses

Yes, having to switch from US Letter to A4 in practically any piece of software makes me angry too. But this will pass...

> Localisation requirements are a fact of life.

There are many other ugly facts of today's life (e.g. a need to support millions of lines of COBOL). Doesn't mean this will never change.

> none of the various empires in history managed to do it.

You're wrong. _All_ empires did manage to do it. They wouldn't become empires otherwise. During a thousand years of the Roman Empire, Latin was such a language. During the years of the Soviet empire, Russian was such a language.

What you apparently mean is that none of the empires fully managed to suppress local languages/cultures (in fact, Romans didn't even try). But it's a different story.

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A Tokyo trip report

Posted Jul 20, 2007 3:05 UTC (Fri) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Yes, having to switch from US Letter to A4 in practically any piece of software makes me angry too.

As a developer for a U.S. company I'd occasionally go to Switzerland to work with one of our customers.

A few times I took a couple of boxes of U.S. letter paper with me. They needed it so when they printed our documentation, they could read the edges, and have the page breaks work out right. :-/

Paper sizes

Posted Jul 26, 2007 20:22 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

It's easy to proportionally scale US Letter documents to A4 and makes little difference to their readability. I deal with US Letter documents all the time and while I find them quite annoying it's not much fuss to work with them really.

The way every application and operating system requires you to change the paper size in three to eight different places, on the other hand, when you've already set "Australia" (or whatever) during the install... now that drives me nuts.

Paper sizes

Posted Jul 26, 2007 20:31 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

> it's not much fuss to work with them really.

Depends on the printer. All Xerox Phasers are extremely picky about page size; when it gets a request for a paper size that that isn't in its tray, it asks to load the corresponding media in the manual tray, and there is no way to force it to use A4 instead...