90 Wire-Bound A4 Documents for an Annual General Meeting, Ordered on a Sunday and Ready the Next Morning

The order: two bound documents and a set of cards, sent as three PDFs

The email came in on a Sunday afternoon with three PDF files and a delivery deadline of 22:00 the next day. The first file was a set of cards: 130, printed in colour on one side of white card and cut to 7 × 5 inches, which is 178 × 127 mm. The second and third were the meeting papers: a board document needed in 20 copies and the annual general meeting document needed in 70 copies, both in colour and double sided. The customer had two questions about them: whether spiral binding was the right choice, and whether the files, laid out at US Letter size, could be printed on A4. The papers were for a two-day meeting on 21 and 22 October, as the printed cover shows.

We quoted all of it as one order. The cards went onto 350gsm card, four to an SRA3 sheet, 33 sheets in all. The documents became colour document printing on 90gsm paper at A4: the board document at 86 pages, or 43 sheets, and the meeting document at 54 pages, or 27 sheets, each copy bound on its own. Together that is 5,500 printed pages on 2,750 sheets. The paper weights we keep for documents and cards are listed in the guide to paper stocks we hold.

The customer was a returning one. The same organisation had ordered meeting papers and name badges from us in October 2025, for its meeting in London that year.

Spiral or wire binding for meeting documents?

The customer asked for advice on spiral binding. We quoted wire binding for both documents, and the customer accepted the quote. A wire-bound document lies flat when it is open on a table, and our wire binding page gives a limit of 300 sheets of 90gsm paper; at 43 and 27 sheets a copy, both documents were far inside it. In the customer’s email the documents were called booklets; a bound document of this kind is one of the formats on our booklet printing page, next to stapled and glued bindings.

This was document printing and binding in one order at our London print shop: one quote covered the printing, the binding, the cards and the courier, so the page count, the binding and the deadline sat in one order record.

Can US Letter documents be printed on A4?

Yes: this order was quoted and printed at A4, the size the customer asked for, from files laid out at US Letter. As general advice rather than a record of how these files were handled, the two sizes differ in shape, not only in name. US Letter is 215.9 × 279.4 mm (8.5 × 11 inches) and A4 is 210 × 297 mm, so a Letter page is 5.9 mm wider and 17.6 mm shorter than A4. Scaled to fit the width of A4, a Letter page prints at about 97 percent and leaves roughly 25 mm of extra height on each page, split between the top and the foot depending on how the page is placed. For a wire-bound document, our wire binding page also asks for a clear inside margin of 15 mm, because the punch bites about 12 mm into that edge.

If a document has to stay at US Letter, we print that too: the NVIDIA conference flyers case study records US Letter printed at its own size. The guide on which file format to send for printing covers how to export a PDF at the size you want printed.

From a Sunday email to a courier on Monday: the timeline

Every time below is London time (BST; the clocks went back a week later, on Sunday 25 October), taken from our mailbox and the order record.

Our guide to how print delivery works in London explains the courier side, and the guide to urgent print jobs in London covers what to send when the deadline is the next day.

In short: Silver Image Print & Signs printed 90 wire-bound AGM documents in London, 5,500 A4 pages in full colour, plus 130 cards on 350gsm, from an email at 13:44 on a Sunday to an order marked ready at 10:26 the next morning.

Meeting papers like these are one part of what we print for events and conferences, and deliveries to guests and organisers staying at a hotel are covered on the page about printing for hotels and venues.

What to tell us when you order bound meeting documents

For colour documents printed and wire bound like this order, these are the details that let us quote and plan accurately:

• How many copies of each document, and the page count of each. Here it was 20 copies of 86 pages and 70 copies of 54 pages.
• The size the files are laid out at, and the size you want printed. Say if the files are US Letter and the copies should be A4, as on this order.
• Colour or black and white, single or double sided. Both documents here were colour and double sided.
• The binding, or the question. If you are not sure between spiral, wire, staples or glue, say what the document is for and we will advise, as we did here.
• Anything else in the same order. The cards here, 130 at 7 × 5 inches, went into the same quote and the same delivery.
• The delivery address, the recipient and the deadline. For a hotel, give the guest’s name for reception and the latest time it can arrive.