A5 Hole Spacing - Variants

I recently had reason to further investigate the other variants of hole spacings on A5 pre-printed inserts. The type sold by Gillio and Van der Spek and other companies that sell the inserts that go under the Euro-Time brand name.

For some odd reason, which I have never understood, these 'A5' inserts aren't A5 at all, but in fact US Half Letter size, so they are taller but narrower than A5, but for now we will ignore that small but significant detail!

What I was interested in was the pre-punched holes which are 4 slots and 3 holes. They are made like this to accommodate different designs of ring mechanism.

So on the normal, conventional, 'standard' (if it is!) Filofax A5 spacing it looks something like this:

The 1st, 3rd, 4th and 6th rings are located in the middle of the slotted holes, but this doesn't matter because the 2nd and 5th rings are sat in normal size round holes. Thus stabilising where the pages sit in the vertical plane.

Another variation for A5 is the '4 ring European A5' ring mechanism, which fits something like this:

In this case the rings are at each end of the slotted holes so once again the pages are stabilised in the vertical plane.

I have seen this type of 4 ring A5 mechanism used in conference folders.

There used to be a Gillio Compact A5 Amica that used this type of mechanism too, but they were phased out some time ago.

These pages can also be used in other binders with other types of ring mechanisms. For instance the 3 ring system used in the USA for this size paper. That looks something like this:

So they are quite versatile in terms of what this sort of insert can fit. I am fairly certain that other brands of paper come with similar pre-punched holes.

The significance of why I looked in to these details will become apparent fairly soon!