What I find amusing about the admonition to use points is that points are printing-industry-based, not monitor- or Web-based. There are 12 points in a pica, or 72 points in an inch. Back in the day, one pica was .166 of an inch; now it is 1.6 of an inch. But we don't use inches or picas when discussing the web.
I'm aware of the discussions about using point sizes on the web, so I'm not opening that discussion. An em is another issue. On the surface, an em is a unit of measurement that uses the width of the capital "M" in a font. An en is a unit of measurement that uses the capital "N" of a font. Except with many fonts nowadays, there may be no capital M's or N's, or the caps (or rest of the letters) are a weird height or width. With CSS3 gaining support, and therefore font-embedding, this will be an issue. I used to be able to take an "E" Gauge (a type size gauge), find the cap height of a capital "E," and then be able to tell what the font size was. Not so much anymore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(unit_of_measure) http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/intermediate/a/picaspoints.htm Don't even get me started on leading. Theresa (graphic designer - and old-time typesetter - for 38 years now) On Aug 10, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Michael Stevens wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: hramr...@gmail.com [mailto:hramr...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of > Michal > Suchanek > >> The problem is that the physical size is what the user sees, not >> the pixel > resolution. That's why it's better to avoid pixels and specify sizes > in > points or other physical units where possible. ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
