Choosing a printer for your office is a delicate balance of standardisation, versatility, affordability and accessibility.
You should have access to every print size you will need more than once in your office, school or retail location and should be reliable enough to work without requiring constant repairs.
Theoretically, specialist printers can produce huge documents of any size and proportions as long as there are suitable print materials, but most conventional printers rely on conventional print sizes such as those found in ISO 216.
Most office staff are only going to print documents in A4, the most conventional print format in the world, but what is the largest document size a typical multifunction printer can print?
To understand this, it is important to explore why certain paper sizes became standard in the first place and why we tend to print the vast majority of documents in around half a dozen formats.
What Are The Most Common Photocopier Printer Formats?
Generally speaking, photocopiers print according to standardised paper formats, and whilst these used to be somewhat regional, most paper formats today are derived from ISO 216, which includes a series of paper sizes based on a specified aspect ratio that are twice as large or small as each other.
The most common of these are:
- A4, the most common paper format used for documents.
- A3, twice as big as A4 and used for standardised posters.
- A5, half the size of A4 and commonly used for pamphlets and flyers.
- B4, a variant that is commonly used for sheet music.
- B5, half the size of B4 and commonly used for books.
Both B4 and B5 are also commonly used for envelopes along with the now-withdrawn C series.
However, these are just some of the most common print formats out there, and most photocopiers will also be compatible with several regional formats, such as the US letter format.
Which Countries Do Not Use A4 As A Standard Paper Format?
It is probably easier to list the countries in the world which do not use A4 as the default letter paper format. There are only eight countries where A4 is not the standard, all of which use the US letter format (8.5 inch x 11 inch) instead:
- United States of America.
- Canada.
- Mexico.
- Columbia.
- Chile.
- Costa Rica.
- Venezuela.
- The Philippines.
What Is The Largest Standard Document Format?
In general, MFD printers and photocopiers are designed to print or photocopy A4 documents both in portrait and landscape format.
Because of this, they have the capacity to print documents in A3 as well as A4. However, outside of specialist hardware, larger and more esoteric document formats are far harder to print using conventional equipment.
A3 is a very popular format for posters, large documents and magazines. A3 can be used to print up to four sides of A4 (front and back), which in turn can be collated and stapled together to make larger publications that would otherwise need adhesives or more awkward stapling to stick together.
How Did A3 Become The Standard Format For Posters?
To understand why so many posters are printed in A3, it is important to understand where it came from and why the A and B series print sizes became standard almost everywhere in the world.
Historically, there was a wide range of paper formats that had developed over generations.
Alongside the US letter, there was the foolscap (8.5 inches by 13.5 inches), which was the traditional format of the British Empire.
Interestingly, both it and the later A4 standard were produced in Germany before spreading.
The principle behind the A series, where each size had an aspect ratio of the square root of two and thus were multiples of each other, is credited to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a satirist and polymath.
He noticed that some paper sizes already fitted this ratio, and over time, the concept would turn into the German standard DIN 476 in 1922.
There was an attempt to turn these into actual paper sizes as early as 1798, thanks to the works of Lazare Carnot, but his six paper sizes were not ultimately adopted outside of the French Revolution:
- A2, known as “grand registre”.
- A3, known as “moyen papier”.
- B3, known as “grande papier”.
- B4, known as “petit papier”.
- B5, known as “demi feuille”
- B6, known as “effets de commerce”.
The sizes actually began with the largest possible sizes in both the A and B series, which ultimately overlapped with Mr Carnot’s forgotten sizes:
- A0 has an area of one square metre.
- B0 has a short edge that is one metre long.
From there, the format quickly spread from Germany. Nine countries adopted it before the Second World War, and by the time it became an ISO standard, 88 of the then-148 countries of the world used it.