Discover the standard paper sizes typically used in architecture, engineering, and contracting offices and understand their specific applications in various project stages. Learn about the relationship between these paper sizes and how they can be utilized for efficient printing and project review.
Key Insights
- The four standard paper sizes used in the architecture and engineering field are 8.5 by 11, 11 by 17, 22 by 34, and 30 by 42. These are used for different types of documents ranging from Word documents to architectural drawings.
- The most common architectural drawing size is 22 by 34, usually referred to as the ANSI D. It allows efficient scaling for prints on smaller 11 by 17 paper size without compromising the drawing's details.
- The largest standard size, 30 by 42 or the architectural E1 sheet, is used for more extensive projects. The dimensions of these paper sizes are designed purposefully to allow easy scaling and printing between the sizes, making them very functional in the workspace.
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There are really four standard sizes of paper we use in an Architecture, Engineering, or Contracting office. That would be eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch paper. We use that for Microsoft Word-type documents.
We'll use that for faxes, you know, if people still fax much. We'll do this for notes and correspondence or eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch. We will use eleven by seventeen sheets for a lot of small print jobs.
I think we all know that pretty much all of the printers we buy these days are eleven by seventeen. So they can be either called Tabloid or Ledger. We just typically call them eleven by seventeen.
We have eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch, eleven by seventeen, twenty-two by thirty-four, and thirty by forty-two. So what happens is that most of the architectural drawings that people put out for projects for blueprints these days are twenty-two by thirty-four. So you can draw your drawings on these ANSI D (twenty-two by thirty-four-inch) sheets of paper at the appropriate scale.
And I'll say that the scale is a half-inch equals one foot. What I can do though is I can take this twenty-two by thirty-four and I can print it at half-size on eleven by seventeen. So what this lets me do is I can do a check set, which is a smaller size representation of the drawings using eleven by seventeen paper that was legally scaled on the twenty-two by thirty-four sheet of paper.
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But it lets me do my redline marking on a set of projects without having to waste a whole lot of paper. So that's eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch, eleven by seventeen, and twenty-two by thirty-four. And then another sheet that's very common is thirty by forty-two, which is an architectural E1 sheet.
These would be larger sheets of paper that are used for larger projects. And so again, if you look at the relationship, we have an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch sheet of paper here. So eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch is essentially half the size of an eleven by seventeen.
If I have my ANSI D sheet, you can see that I can get one, two, three, four eleven by seventeens in the area of a twenty-two by thirty-four. But again, the most common sizes that we use are eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch, eleven by seventeen, twenty-two by thirty-four, and thirty by forty-two. Way back when, a lot of people would use twenty-four by thirty-six-inch as a standard sheet.
But now that people are using eleven-by-seventeen printers so much, that again, people can do their drawings on twenty-two by thirty-four and print a half-size set on the eleven by seventeen, and it's scalable, and it's very, very functional when you're working.
