On Saturday 29 April 2006 05:35 am, James Knott wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Saturday 2006-04-29 at 13:32 +0200, Theo v. Werkhoven wrote:
Well..... A4 is the international ISO stadard for paper size. Now you know the frustration for 5 billion other people on earth who try to use pretty much any software/OS that defaults to US Letter..
Not to mention all the engineers in the 21th century who have to have to revert to 18th century measurement "standards" when they try to speak with their US collegues.
And that was the cause of the failure of one (two?) NASA missions to Mars: wrong unit conversions.
It's amazing that Americans are still so backward as to stick with the Imperial measures.
Unfortuntately, the government decided to get involved in our "conversion" back in the '70s. That said, you see the results. :) As one who studied in West Germany and later worked in Switzerland, I can say that it is far easier to simply "switch" than to ever try an convert. We Ami's always tried to convert from miles to Km and from Fahrenheit to Celsius. That is - and always will be - extremely difficult. Yet simply changing is - in my opinion - much faster and painless. I still have no idea how many miles 50 Km is, nor do I care. I know that it was the distance between my buddy's house and my dorm at the univerity. I also have no idea how many degrees Fahrenheit 24C is. I do know, however, that it was comfortable and better than 5C. Okay, sorry for the OT rant. :) Now, I haven't done this in several months, but I believe that the KDE Control Center has the ability to set the default paper size to A4 or Letter or Legal or B4 or 42 or whatever you want. -- kai - www.perfectreign.com 43...for those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.