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 contracting office. That would be eight and a half by eleven pieces of paper. We use that for Microsoft Word type documents.
We'll use that for faxes, you know, if people still do much faxing. We'll do this for notes and correspondence or eight and a half by eleven. We will use eleven by seventeens for a lot of small size 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, 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 or twenty-two by thirty-four sheets of paper at the appropriate scale.
And I'll say that the scale is a half inch equals a foot. What I can do though is I can take this twenty-two by thirty-four and I can print it half again as small 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 red line marking on a set of projects without having to waste a whole lot of paper. So that's eight and a half by eleven, 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 sheet of paper here. So eight and a half by eleven is essentially half the size of an eleven by seventeen.
If I have my ANSI D, 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, 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 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.
