Foolscap folio


Foolscap folio is paper cut to the size of for printing or to for "normal" writing paper. This was a traditional paper size used in Europe and the British Commonwealth, before the adoption of the international standard A4 paper.
A full foolscap paper sheet is actually in size, and a folio sheet of any type is half the base sheet size.
Ring binders or lever arch files designed to hold foolscap folios are often used to hold A4 paper. The slightly larger size of such a binder offers greater protection to the edges of the pages it contains.

History

Foolscap was named after the fool's cap and bells watermark commonly used from the fifteenth century onwards on paper of these dimensions. The earliest example of such paper was made in Germany in 1479. Unsubstantiated anecdotes suggest that this watermark was introduced to England in 1580 by John Spilman, a German who established a papermill at Dartford, Kent. Apocryphally, the Rump Parliament substituted a fool's cap for the royal arms as a watermark on the paper used for the journals of Parliament.

Oficio

In Venezuela, the paper size is named oficio. While laws expressly permit any paper size, public offices require all documents to be presented in oficio paper size.
In Brazil, the same size is usually named folio, but is also sometimes called ofício II. This is a reference to the paper size, which is known as ofício in Portuguese, despite being called legal in English.

F4

F4 is a paper size. Although metric, based on the A4 paper size, and named to suggest that it is part of the official ISO 216 paper sizes, it is only a de facto standard.
It is often referred to as "foolscap" or "folio" because of its similarity to the traditional foolscap folio size of.