What are all of the paper weights and what do they actually mean?: Basic size & weights explained

August 21, 2009 by Brenda Bell
Filed under: Educational, Paper 

Have you ever wondered what exactly say an 80# text is and why is called 80#? It’s a topic that is often overlooked and often misunderstood. I even had someone tell me once that they thought the weight of paper meant how much pressure was applied to the paper when they made it. As you will see below, that is not true at all.

Simply put, the basis weight (a graphic arts term for the # number eg. 80#) is the actual weight of 500 sheets (a ream) of the basic sheet size. The basic sheet size depends on the grade of paper, so here is a listing of commonly used paper grades and their basic sheet sizes:

Paper Grade: Book (also called text)
Basic Sheet Size: 25 x 38

Paper Grade: Bond and Writing
Basic Sheet Size: 17″x 22″

Paper Grade: Cover
Basic Sheet Size: 20″ x 26″

Paper Grade: Tag
Basic Sheet Size: 24″ x 36″

Paper Grade: Index
Basic Sheet Size: 25.25″ x 30.5″

Referring to the list above you can see that our example of 80# text comes from the fact that 500 25″x38″ sheets actually weigh 80 pounds.

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Comments

2 Comments on What are all of the paper weights and what do they actually mean?: Basic size & weights explained

  1. Karla on Fri, 18th Sep 2009 8:13 pm

    2. For the sake of postage, we need our print work to fall into a particular physical weight. Currently a book that previously was requested on 50# white text came to weigh 3.0 ounces. We now need that same booklet to weigh .40 ounces less to get the overal package down an postage increment to save thousands of dollars. We need to do this while maintaining the “no bleed’ requirement, and keep the paper stable enough to feed through automated equipment. If a 40# paper were available we would go with that. What do you recommend?

  2. Brian Harrison on Mon, 21st Sep 2009 8:07 pm

    3. Hi Karla! Thanks for reading and for the comment:

    Without knowing the complete specs of the book and how you are mailing this currently, I cannot really give a good answer on how to reduce the mailing cost, but here are some generalizations:

    40# stocks are available in web papers (paper on rolls instead of packages of sheets) but depending on the thickness of the overall piece, automated equipment may have trouble feeding it.
    Also, if you drop to a 40# text the opacity of the paper will drop and you will be able to see through it a lot more.

    I would suggest getting a mock up made on a 40# text paper you are considering and see how it feels, see if the opacity value is okay for your purposes and get the post office to test and approve it through their automated equipment, and go from there.

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