Skip to content

Standard Units

Summary

PrintVis Standard Units is an essential setup for the measuring units of format sizes, paper weights and thicknesses.

This setup only needs to be done once, when setting up a new (empty) company. It is the definition for which units of measure for the sizes of machines, papers, products, their margins, and other parameters are predefined.

This setup should not be changed after setup of paper or machines is done, or if calculated jobs already exist in the system. The reason is there is no routine that converts the values from one unit setup to another.

There are 3 default setup settings that can be used:

  1. Metric Units in cm (Centimeter)

  2. Metric Units in mm (Millimeter)

  3. US Standard Units based on the Imperial System

This setup can be done on the PrintVis Standard Units setup page by using the buttons below, or can be requested while using the PrintVis RapidStart Worksheet:

Standard Units

Default Metric Units

Centimeter (cm) Setup

Standard Units

Millimeter (mm) Setup

Standard Units

Default US Standard Units

Imperial Setup

Standard Units

Because the paper weight in the United States is not defined by a specific weight per area (grams per square meter, as in most of the world (Grammage)), a Paper Weight setup is used to set up the needed reference paper sizes.

Also, Yield is now part of the US standard. Yield is defined as number of Sq ft per Pound of material.

Defaults are shown above, and further setup is possible:

Standard Units

In this setup, you can add more paper reference codes. For example, if you want to use the term "BOOK" instead of the term "TEXT."

Some examples for known equivalents

Equivalents for Book paper:

  • Book

  • Bible

  • Coated

  • Offset

  • Text

Equivalents for Bond paper:

  • Bond

  • Duplicator

  • Ledger

  • Manifold

  • Mimeo

  • Onionskin

  • Rag Paper

  • Safety

  • Wedding

Others exist as well, and you can define any required weight by adding the reference format and quantity.

Please note: The formula text is built automatically out of the other existing fields. The description of the line of type "Format" will be used as reference format code in the Formula Text field.

Also, Yield is now part of the US standard. Yield is defined as number of Sq ft per Pound of material. With the last column, "Per Paper Weight," the calculation is opposite: Sq ft per pound, and not pound per sq ft.

It is possible to change the standard formulas or to create a custom setup.

It is common for the definition of paper thickness to be modified in cases.

  • Mil or caliper => a thousandth of an inch

  • Micron or micrometer (μm) => a thousandth of a mm or 1×10−6 of a meter.

Note that caliper here is expressed in thousandths of an inch or, in some cases, as little as hundredths of thousandths of an inch. In the paper industry, paper thickness is also expressed in points (a single point is equal to .001”). To convert these decimal inch values into points, divide the average caliper number by .001. For example, a sheet of paper that is .0095″ thick has a caliper of 9.5 points.