New reflective LCD panel slashes power consumption

Sharp has developed a touch panel that can accurately pick up text written with a ballpoint pen. This sets the device apart from conventional ones that require a stylus with a wider tip. The new liquid crystal display panel has roughly four times the sensitivity of hitherto existing models, making it the world's top performer in that regard, according to Sharp. The Japanese electronics company plans to start domestic mass production of the device next spring and make it a mainstay product in its LCD business.

Sharp's new panel works with ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils with 1mm or even narrower tips. The company's current production lines can make the panel.

Source: Nikkei

GPU-accelerated Path Rendering

Last May I wrote about a major breakthrough in path rendering on the GPU by Mark Kilgard. I am happy to report that Mark—together with Jeff Bolz—has been hard at work on the rest necessary for a complete raster image processor (RIP). They have invented a new "Stencil, then Cover" (StC) algorithm in which the stencil step is explicitly decoupled from the subsequent cover step.

In the stencil step, a path's filled or stroked coverage is determined. In the cover step, the conservative geometry intended to test and reset the coverage determinations of the stencil step is rasterized, while shading color samples within the path. They have not only achieved fantastic acceleration, but also full completeness and correctness. Usually, the performance killer is the bottleneck between CPU and GPU, like when transparency is computed in the CPU. Kilgard and Bolz solve their revalidation bottleneck by using a configurable front-end processor in the GPU to transition quickly between the stencil step and the cover step.

For more information, see their paper at SIGGRAPH Asia, a pre-print of which is available at this link: http://developer.nvidia.com/game/gpu-accelerated-path-rendering.

Binarization

This year I have been working on document information retrieval, which is as far from color as you can imagine. Indeed, business documents are pretty dry binary black and white items, so that the first step—before even doing optical character recognition—is to binarize the document images so we can efficiently work with bitmaps. In the old days binarization was relatively easy, because almost any scanner illumination can easily be compensated when it is not uniform (see US patent 5,901,243).

Today binarization is much harder, because an increased number of documents is imaged with digital cameras, most often of the kind in smart phones. Much work went into extending existing binarization algorithms to text in pictorial images, alas with little success. It turns out that a completely different algorithmic approach is required, as was recently published in the paper

Yan Wang and Chuanjiang He, Binarization method based on evolution equation for document images produced by cameras, Journal of Electronic Imaging 21 (2012), no. 2, 023030

Here is the abstract:

We present an evolution equation-based binarization method for document images produced by cameras. Unlike the existing thresholding techniques, the idea behind our method is that a family of gradually binarized images is obtained by the solution of an evolution partial differential equation, starting with an original image. In our formulation, the evolution is controlled by a global force and a local force, both of which have opposite sign inside and outside the object of interests in the original image. A simple finite difference scheme with a significantly larger time step is used to solve the evolution equation numerically; the desired binarization is typically obtained after only one or two iterations. Experimental results on 122 camera document images show that our method yields good visual quality and OCR performance.

Path rendering on the GPU

Archimedes of Syracuse famously claimed "give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth." Understanding the principle of the lever is key for being successful in technology.

color consolidation

In a recent press release, Danaher Corporation on 2200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, D.C. announced that it purchased X-Rite for approximately $625 million. X-Rite had purchased Pantone and Gretag, and the latter had purchased Macbeth. Danaher already owns well-known brands like Tektronix, Fluke, Leica Microsystems, Beckman Coulter, Videojet, and Esco (a leader in industrial digital printing) among others.

Combatting bit rot with steganography

Over the years we had various posts on bit rot, the problem that digitally stored images become unaccessible after just a few years because the system that can decode them is no longer available. Essentially, this might be an ethical problem we cannot solve with technology.

Recently, steganography has been proposed as a possible solution for digital image archiving, so today we revisit the origins of this approach.

To avoid unnecessary excitement, lets us just reveal from the beginning that it cannot do anything about bit rot in image archives, because it requires a system to decode. Sure, you might interject we can always implement a decoder, but as we saw with PhotoCD, unless there is a commercial product in the form of an operating system feature, this statement is useless in practice. For example, we can read punched cards by simply scanning them, but I doubt that you would pursue this route if you still had a stack of cards in your basement.

In the early days of digital color printing, the Feds were the early adopters of technology, so we always had their requirements in mind. One requirement relating to copiers and telecopiers (digital facsimile machines) was to be able to subject a document to seven copy generations without degrading its readability.

At the time this lead to religious wars of colorimetric reproduction versus preferred color reproduction, with the idea that colorimetric systems stood a better chance in surviving seven generations, while preferred color reproduction (e.g., saturation boost and contrast enhancement) would make more money because most customers make just one generation and a better looking copy begets more business.

The main digital color print technologies at the time comprised liquid and dry xerography, acoustic inkjet, thermal transfer, and dye diffusion thermal transfer (D2T2). In industrial research labs we cared mostly about dry xerography, because that is where the biggest profits were.

At that time we were fighting with the triboelectric effect, so halftoning with dispersed dots like dithering, or error diffusion, did not work well and be had to use clustered dot halftoning. We were achieving the best results with Tom Holladay's rotated dots. They were ellipses at a 45º angle, which were robust for the triboelectric effect and prevented the human visual system from connecting the dots into unsightly patterns.

Research is about synergies and serendipity, so at this point I need to digress.

At that time (late 80s) PARC had a big cross-lab project called System 33. It played a big role in Xerox renaming itself the document company and had a big effect on society by introducing concepts like Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing, document management, etc. The basic idea was to take all possible technologies currently in the research stage and connect them together in one big bet.

One of these concepts was Smart Paper (not to be confused with the SmartPaper that then became Gyricon). Every document would have a cover page that could act as a banner page for print and a cover page for fax. This page would also have a barcode universally identifying the document. On one side this provided a solution for the copy generation problem, because a copier could reprint the original document referenced in the barcode instead of the document on the platen (annotation could be lifted from the paper document and overprinted onto the original document).

On the other side, having a cover page on every document is ugly and a barcode is even uglier. Although all this is done by document delivery services, you do not want this on all your office documents.

At this point the preceding two threads can be combined. Enter Rob Tow (click here for his account), who in 1988 came up with the idea of encoding information in images on documents (all office documents tend to have at least a company logo) by using Holladay's rotated dots for a binary code, by simply rotating them at ±45º. Rob called them glyphs.

Encoding a document's universal identifier in the logo was just a simple application. A more compelling application was to encode the CIELAB values of an image's pixels in the image's halftones. A dumb copier would simply do whatever it did to copy an image, but a smart copier would decode the image's colorimetric information from the halftones by interpreting them as glyphs.

At the time we coined the phrase "scan–think–print" for digital copying, so we could safely assume each one of our copiers would always have the additional intelligence to restore an image's colors from the glyphs. The actual image was then just a backup for the dumb copiers from the competition.

We even filed an invention disclosure for an Oliver North copier, which was a DocuTech with a built-in shredder. It would scan each page, encrypt the bitmap, and print the result using glyphs. The original document would be shredded right then and there, as part of the process. The copy could be stored and distributed in plain sight. It could even be copied at least seven generations, but only when the operator inserted in the copier a token with the decryption key, the copy would be the original readable document. This would have solved North's problem because he would have had only his token to be destroyed.

Rob got US Patent 5,315,098 on the basic concept, but then it took a lot of work to turn the idea into a robust technology. For one, the glyphs had to survive the infamous seven copy generations. Meg Withgott had come up with the concept of document dry-cleaning, but it took Dan Bloomberg substantial work in mathematical morphology to achieve a robust implementation for glyphs.

Then there were the problems of optical distortions, self-clocking, and error correction, among many others. All said, until the technology was done David Hecht and Noah Flores got 51 more US patents solving all the details.

The final artifact became a Xerox product under the trademark DataGlyphs. A project called Express (Henry Sang, Jr. was one of its leaders) achieved a successful commercial deployment solving the problem of processing the field test reports for Syntex, with others following.

Bit rot refers to images meant for archival applications. In that sense the glyph technology was not invented for bit rot but for document management, i.e., with a limited time scope in mind.

I am also using the term steganography in a loose sense, because it really refers to hiding a secret payload image into a carrier image. As such, steganography has to work only over a very restricted time span, just to smuggle an image through a hostile boundary.

A related concept is that of watermarks. Here the system has to be available only for the duration of a copyright, and the owner has a pecuniary incentive to keep the system working during this time.

As far as I know, currently the most promising remedy for bit rot is encoding the images in the DNG format and encapsulating them into a PDF file. However, this archiving path is not yet available at the operating system level. And there will always be the ethical issue to enable digital image archiving.

vicissitudes of a color book

Books can do amazing. Last October, in his post To Bits and Back Again, Nathan picked up a story on how I had to clean up the clutter on my desk. He wrote how Google's Dan Bloomberg recycled my book clutter through his secret π machine for the edification of readers on the whole planet. Here is the next saga:

Custom Print Bigger Than Search?

Last week Fast Company published a graphic that showed the spending on marketing and advertising in 2010. It's an interesting figure with lots of items of discussion. One thing that caught my eye was the difference betwen custom print versus online search.



The marketing and advertising spend for custom print publications is estimated at $19 billion while search engine ads is estimated to be $14 billion.

Computer History Museum on MagCloud

The Computer History Museum has recently published a number of magazines using MagCloud. The magazine on the IBM 1401 has a delightful back cover image.



There's just something about tangible bits.

3.5 Miles of Wiring & Mixed Media Print Jobs

A digital press with 3.5 miles of wiring...



... and mixed media print jobs.

16.7 Gb of Color per Second

Color at four hundred feet per minute.

Photographic Benefit for Hatian Earthquake Survivors

Photographers for Hati has published a photographic benefit for Hatian earthquake survivors. All proceeds of this magazine will go to the American Red Cross International Response Fund for Haiti relief.



You can read more details in this interview with Lane Hartwell, which includes the following quote from Lane:

"I thought about how I could use photography to raise money immediately."

The resulting humanitarian pages are impressive and inspiring.

Feeding big iron

Back in the mid-eighties, things were looking good for big iron printers. Tibor Fisli was getting very nice uniform dots with his quad-spot laser diodes and Gary Starkweather was succeeding with his 4000 dpi follower to the Platemaker, while Nick Sheridon was cranking up the printer speed to 300 ppm. The challenge for us in the Computer Science Lab was to be able to drive this big iron at speed.

The graphic designers who were producing their material digitally on scanners from Crosfield, Hell, and Scitex were suffering from hardware that was much slower than they could lay out a spread. Therefore, the next big investment of a successful pre-press house was the acquisition of a vector processor, which allowed feats like rotating an image. Parallel computing is key in the graphic arts and printing.

This told us that the way of the Dorado with its ECL logic was not the right way. The follower would be a multi-processor system with CMOS logic. Thus the Dragon was designed, and considerable effort went into simulations to balance the system architecture.

The simulations showed that scalability works only up to 8 processors. Adding more processors did not increase linearly Dragon's performance, but it was still a very powerful machine at the time.

Then came what Nathan likes to call a tenuki. Smart politicians realized that instead of out-braining the evil empire we can just out-spend it and destroy it that way. This marked the end of research and the beginning of out-sourcing. What counts is price, not performance, so everything just became done incrementally where ever the wages were lowest.

Until now. CMOS has hit the wall and is not getting faster, so we are back to multiprocessing, or in today's lingo, multi-cores. In the meantime, big iron has slowly kept growing:

These are real beasts and manufacture new material that can be designed on today's powerful workstations, like posters 5 meters high and half a kilometer long, or custom photo albums where each album has completely different pictures, or variable data print jobs where each piece is customized for the specific reader:

When you use an industrial printer to print a building-wrap, or a commercial printer to print a million different magazines, you cannot trade complexity for time. The halftoned separations are so big you do not have time to wait for the bits to be served from a slow disk. You need to print in real-time.

How can you feed big iron?

Today's general purpose processors are not really well suited for rendering pixels. In fact, they are really a RISC in a CISC and a lot of the chip surface is used to predict branches, cache loops, interpret complex instructions, etc. This is all stuff that is not really needed when you stream a gazillion pixels through the system and apply the same rendering operations to them.

What you want is not a fancy core with most of the silicon just sitting there while you try to feed your big iron. It is better to have a simple basic processor, but to have a lot of them, like the vector processors of yore.

Well, an important computer application are games, and gamers have similar rendering requirements as yours, but they are many more, so GPUs are inexpensive consumer products.

Until a short time ago, the GPUs were very specialized, but their architecture has changed considerably in the last few years and they have become programmable. The latest crop, combined with OpenCL, are actually simple general purpose processors that can be programmed to render all the pixels required to feed the big iron.

I have oversimplified a bit. In fact, the print job comes in the form of a PDF file, and rendering is not the only task of a RIP. There are operations like interpretation that cannot be parallelized at the pixel level und must be executed serially on general purpose cores, where for example each core works on a different page or tile.

To run the big industrial and commercial jobs, we not only need scalability down, but we also need scalability up, because there is a limit on the number of cores in a system and we would like to have multiple systems working on the same job. This is achieved with mapReduce algorithms:

In summary, to feed big iron with jobs like 5 by 500 meters size posters or 1 million different book pages you need scalability, and you need to be able to scale up as well as scaling down:

To learn how to achieve this, you may want to attend the Electronic Imaging Symposium in San Jose next week, where in the conference Color Imaging XV: Displaying, Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications in the session on Color Reproduction and Printing, John L. Recker will present all the gory details.

Real Virtual Pages and Virtual Real Pages

From the in-box comes two different links to digital pages. In one case it's real virtual pages and in the other it's virtual real pages. From Udi comes a link to a set of collectible magcloud magazines relating to the movie Avatar. Which is interesting - a dynamic and timely publication of a physical artifact based on a movie largely constructed with computer graphics.



But what does this have to do with football you may be asking yourself?

Objects Make Better Gifts

This weekend was Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco.



During a webcomics panel at least two of the panelists said one of the reasons they decided to try out publishing a webcomic was to be able to experiment with color in their comics.

Which is to say web color is still cheaper than printed color.

To Bits and Back Again

When we last heard about complex color, it was to say farewell and bear witness as a pile of papers migrated from desktop to recycling bin.



But a funny thing happened on the way to the recycling bin - there was an excursion. Several excursions.

hapy birthday

Somewhere out there is a bag with the rest of the candles.

That Unthinkable Future

In 2005 John Updike wrote a poem about his birthday. It included the lines:

A life poured into words -
apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing
consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable
future
when I am dead, will read? The
printed page
was just a half-millennium's brief
wonder...


Unthinkable future indeed.

Shortly after reading this I had yet another discussion with Giordano about tags (and/or labels) not really being about serendipity but for structure. He had previously emphasized discipline with the mostlycolor tags to the point of giving me a small figurine of a Pueblo storyteller for my desk.



The mother figure is shown surrounded with children listening to her stories. But the figurine is just a metaphor for tagging. Each child is a thread that emerges over time with thoughtful and consistent tagging.

Fine I will not add a John Updike, poetry or half-millennium labels to this post.

But have we reached the unthinkable future?

Late last week, a partnership between Google and OnDemand was announced which would allow allow books digitized by Google Books to be printed (and finished) by OnDemand's Espresso Book Machine. If you haven't seen an Espresso Book Machine yet it looks something like this:



OK so once Updike's poems pass into the public domain (you do the math) then you might be able to get a copy printed on demand via this partnership. Sounds good. John may be remembered even after my glass is long empty. I for one think it was great that "he was still asleep when we went to school, and was often home already when we got back".

Then I hear Neil Postman whispering: "We might even say that the printing of the Bible in vernacular languages introduced the impression that God was an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman--that is to say, printing reduced God to the dimensions of a local potentate." And I'm left struggling with another deconstructed medium projecting a disproportionate sense of scale to the participants of that deconstructed medium.

Kind of like blogging (the first medium born deconstructed?).

And in in that same Postman essay is an aside to Solomon's proverbial wisdom. A whopping 3000 proverbs. An oral tradition in which presumably every spoken word was in the public domain. The competitive advantage was then the way in which those words were spoken, remembered, expressed and maybe lived.

What an unthinkable past.

Black

I was recently re-reading chapter 11 on the black printer in Yule's Principles of Color Reproduction [1].

When in 1719 Jacob Christoph Le Blon invented the principle of trichromatic printing (British patent 423), one of the innovations was his adding a fourth mezzotint engraving plate for a black separation [2]. The black separation simultaneously solved a number of problems:

• since a gray component is present in a large portion of each image, the black separation can be used as a registration key (therefore the abbreviation K)
• when the gray component is removed from the chromatic layers, these are thinner and therefore use less of the more expensive color inks
• in addition, the drying time is shorter (ink limits) and the press can be run faster, further reducing cost
• the gray balance is improved, more robust, and the blacks are cleaner
• last but not least, the gamut is considerably extended for dark colors

The first step in characterizing (i.e., determining the color transformation for) a color printer is to balance the grays. After this step, we know how much cyan, magenta, and yellow ink we need to print to obtain each gray level. Because yellow ink is lighter than cyan and magenta ink, we achieve a maximum gray level where we use the maximum amount of yellow, when there is still room to add cyan and actually only about half of the magenta ink is used.

The tone range from maximum magenta, cyan, yellow to maximum yellow is called the area of gray imbalance, because no gray can be produced. Adding a black separation, the tone range can be increased to include the area of gray imbalance.

Actually, because the black ink is much darker than even magenta, by going all the way to full black, the tone scale can be considerably extended in the range of dark colors.

First a note on terminology. The gray component of a pixel's color was defined by Yule as the amount of the least predominant ink, i.e., min (C, M, Y). In gray component removal (GCR), this minimum was subtracted from the CMY coordinates and formed the black printer. Making room for black by reducing CMY by any other amount was called undercolor removal (UCR). Today the term UCR is no longer used and the term GCR encompasses both the original GCR and UCR.

The gray component replacement function (or simply black function) is difficult to optimize. Three regions in the tone scale are difficult: the dark colors, the light (right) edge of the area of gray imbalance, and the light colors.

Of the three, the middle tone region at the light edge of the area of gray imbalance is easiest to solve. Indeed, the constraint is that the black function must be smooth, i.e., not start abruptly.

In the dark region, the black function is determined by a trade-off between richness of the blacks, ink limits, and the ink cost. Because the shadows are darkened, their contrast is reduced and consequently the contrast has to be exaggerated in the shadows to preserve shadow detail visibility.

By making the middle region smooth, part of the gray component is removed in the light tone range. Normally the substrate on which we print is white. A lighter tone means that less ink is deposited, which in turns means that more white is added. Adding white to a color desaturates it, therefore an aggressive black function will yield a print lacking saturation [3, 4].

By avoiding black ink in light tones, a larger area of the substrate is covered with ink (hiding white), and because of simultaneous contrast, the perceived color is more vivid. This is somewhat related to a skeleton black ([1] p. 286), where such a black printer is used, but without UCR.

However, avoiding black in light tones introduces a complexity in designing the halftoning algorithm, because the simultaneous contrast also amplifies the perceived color error. Therefore, a poor halftoning algorithm requires more accuracy in the color transformation, while a good halftoning algorithm allows for larger tolerances in the color transformation, as well as in the printer stability.

The above information is purely historical. When Kodak's Yule wrote his book, my PC was an Olivetti P101 with 9 registers of data memory, program memory for 120 instructions, and processing speed limited by the time it took a register's mechanical wave on the memory wire to reach the reading terminal, probably running at a few dozen IPS. When Mik and Dusty wrote their report, my PC was a Dorado, with 4M bytes of memory and 1 MIPS. Today I have an HP xw4600 with 2G bytes and running at about 2000 MIPS.

Because of this incredible increase in performance, on today's computers we can compute a fancy black printer using algorithms based on computational and differential geometry models. While in the past we were limited to colorimetry based on aperture colors for color correction, now we can take spatial (complex) color into consideration. This is why today we get such and exceptional color print quality at such a low cost.

If you wrote or read a good recent paper on this subject, share it as a comment to this post.

1. John A.C. Yule, Principles of Color Reproduction, Wiley, New York, 1967
2. J.D. Mollon, "The Origins of Modern Color Science", in The Science of Color (Second Edition), Steven K. Shevell editor, Elsevier Science, 2003
3. Michael G. Lamming and Warren L. Rhodes, Towards "WYSIWYG" Color, Xerox PARC Technical Report EDL-88-2, P87-00018, April 1988
4. Michael G. Lamming and Warren L. Rhodes, "A Simple Method for Improved Color Printing of Monitor Images, ACM Transactions on Graphics, 9, 4, October 1990, 345-375

Paper sizes (formats)

In the office printing business we are so used to the generalization that all paper is letter size, that we often forget that is just one size in which we can buy cut sheet paper. Here is a handy compilation of popular sizes.

A series (main series)

A0 is 1 square meter. Formula: h = w * sqrt (2), i.e., the ratio of the sides is sqrt (2).

This is the normally used series.

A number	size (mm)	size (inch)	area (m^2)
A0	841 x 1189	33.1 x 46.8	1.0
A1	594 x 841	23.4 x 33.1	0.5
A2	420 x 594	16.5 x 23.4	0.25
A3	297 x 420	11.7 x 16.5	0.125
A4	210 x 297	8.3 x 11.7	0.063
A5	148 x 210	5.8 x 8.3	0.031
A6	105 x 148
A7	74 x 105
A8	52 x 74
A9	37 x 52
A10	26 x 37

B series (auxiliary series)

B0 is 1 m long on the short side.

This series is sold only in cut sheets (in plano) and can be used only if the required size is not available in the A series.

C series (intermediary series)

Geometric average between series A and series B. Example: C4 = sqrt (A4 * B4).

This series has been designed especially for envelopes and other mailing containers.

DIN Summary in mm

Class	Series A	Series B	Series C	Series D
0	841 x 1189	1000 x 1414	917 x 1297	771 x 1090
1	594 x 841	707 x 1000	648 x 917	545 x 771
2	420 x 594	500 x 707	458 x 648	385 x 545
3	297 x 420	353 x 500	324 x 458	272 x 385
4	210 x 297	250 x 353	229 x 324	192 x 272
5	148 x 210	176 x 250	162 x 229	136 x 192
6	105 x 148	125 x 176	114 x 162	96 x 136
7	74 x 105	88 x 125	81 x 114	68 x 96
8	52 x 74	62 x 88	57 x 81	48 x 68

Old European Formats

These formats were in use before the normalization and can still be found today in the graphic arts. This is just a selection in plano (= unfolded) papers. When the papers are folded, the name is prefixed by the folding number (e.g., in 4º Jésus refers to the Jésus format folded in four); usually the Latin names are used:

• in folio, 2 sheets or 4 pages
• in quarto, 4 sheets or 8 pages
• in octavo, 8 sheets or 16 pages
• in 16, etc.

Designation	size (cm)
Couronne édition	37 x 47
Double pot	40 x 62
Coquille	44 x 56
Double Tellière	44 x 66
Carré	45 x 56
Couronne	46 x 72
Raisin	50 x 65
Raisin offset	51 x 66
Jésus	56 x 76
Double coquille	56 x 88
Double carré	56 x 90
Jésus offset	58 x 78
Carré offset	58 x 90
Colombier affiches	60 x 80
Colombier	63 x 90
Double raisin	65 x 100
Double raisin offset	66 x 102
Double Jésus	76 x 112
Double Jésus offset	78 x 112
Double Colombier	80 x 120
Quadriple carré	90 x 112

American Paper Sizes

Designation	size (in)
atlas	26 x 24
imperial	22 x 30
elephant	20 x 27
royal	20 x 25
small royal	19 x 25
medium	18 x 23
demy	17.5 x 22.5
crown	15 x 20
foolscap	17 x 13.5
pot	12.5 x 15.5

European Form Sizes

Class	size (mm)
0	500 x 700
I	560 x 830
II	610 x 860
III	650 x965
III b	720 x 1020
IV	780 x 1120
V	890 x 1260
VI	1000 x 1400
VII	1100 x 1600
X	1400 x 2000

ANSI Paper Sizes

Designation	size (inch)
A (letter)	8.5 x 11
B (tabloid)	11 x 17
C	17 x 22
D	22 x 34
E	34 x 44

ARCH Paper Sizes

Designation	size (inch)
A	9 x 12
B	12 x 18
C	18 x 24
D	24 x 36
E	36 x 48

Favorite Cut Sheet Media

These are in plano formats common in the electronic printing industry.

Designation	U.S. market (inch)	metric market (mm)
US letter / ISO and JIS A4	8.5 x 11	210 x 297
US executive	7.25 x 10.5
US legal	8.5 x 14
ISO and JIS A5		148.5 x 210
JIS B5		182 x 257
Postcard	4 x 6	102 x 152
Greeting card	8.5 x 11 scored (folds to 8.5 x 5.5)	210 x 297 scored (folds to 210 x 148 )
Note card	5.5 x 8.5 scored (folds to 5.5 x 4.25)	148 x 210 scored (folds to 148 x 105 )
US index card ISO and JIS A6 card	4 x 6, 5 x 8	105 x 148
Calendar kit	8.5 x 11	210 x 297
Hagaki (postcard) 葉書大「はがきだい」		100 x 148
Oufuku-hagaki (return postcard) 往復葉書 「おうふくはがき」		148 x 200

Favorite Envelope Sizes

Envelope description	Envelope size
US commercial-10	4.125" x 9.5"
International DL	110 mm x 220 mm
International C6	114 mm x 162 mm
US A2	4.375" x 5.75"

Page Length Line Values

Paper Size	6 lpi	8 lpi
Letter	66	88
Legal	84	112
A4	70	93
Executive	63	84

American Paper Weights

onion skin	9 lb.
mimeograph paper	16 lb.
standard typing paper	20 lb.
standard letterhead paper	24 lb.
good for printing on both sides	60 lb.
business cards and postcards	65 lb.
coated magazine stock	100 lb.
poster board	120 lb.