#741: AntiA4

It seems crazy still to be outputting print onto paper. It’s heavy, flammable and pretty much unsearchable in large quantities. Many people seem to be unable to read volumes of material on a screen, however, and so today’s invention is yet another way to restrict the waste that this involves.

Inspired by the continuous rolls of paper used to print receipts, today’s invention is intended to free us from the tyranny of the A4 sheet. When printing something to read, or pin to one’s noticeboard, a large proportion of the printable surface at the end of any document is blank (not to mention the page breaks themselves). Using a continuous roll of paper (rather than a trayful of discrete pages) would allow the end of the written content to be detected and the paper automatically severed at that point.

Any resulting documents would thus have a random physical page length -which would have the added advantage of discouraging filing the damned stuff (if you were absolutely compelled on occasion to work in A4, a simple full stop at the end of each ‘page’ would still allow that of course).