Excellent work, Louis. Please see my "input" below. On Mon, 11 Feb 2002 23:16:43 ...I already received two messages. The first one comes from a typograph >in Vancouver, who never heard about the Q and does not really favors >the SI. Just a quote from his message : >At 9:11 -0800 02/02/11, John Hudson wrote: >>music, by the way, should be included in your exceptions to SI, with >>the added note that the metric system is inherently unmusical > We invariably hear this kind of crap indeed quite often. However, they fail to realize that in music we simply do not have any "measurements" to deal with, except to know how many specific notes of different durations it would take to fill a 4/4 section, for example...
And when it comes to instruments, who said lengths of cords, for instance, would *have* to be a nice, rational round number in ifp to provide a specific note??? ... >>From a theoretical level, I personally find the "Q" unsatisfactory >>as an SI unit, because it is 1/4 of a mm, instead of having a simple >>decimal relationship to the mm. (Although I live in the US, I grew >>up in Canada when the SI switch was being made, and am comfortable >>with both systems.) >> Here, this guy is dead on! I shouldn't expect anything less from a truly unbiased professional who has had a minimum of exposure to the SI system! Way to go, Mr. Phinney! No question about it. We should NOT IMHO support this Q thing for the reasons I've already outlined here. We should either lobby for the introduction of the 10^-4 m or stick with the good old mm. However, I'd have a slight preference for the former because I do realize typographers may require very fine accuracies. Only question is though, what name should we give it?... :-S Therefore, how about you mention the above to him, Louis? Test the waters, please, see how he would react to a 10^-4 framework. You could argue that this would be more than enough for typographers to work with. If they would be satisfied with a 0.25-mm "unit" they should be even happier with a 0.1 mm size. Then they could simply go in increments of 2 X (I'll use the X name, for now...). There would never be a worse accuracy than 0.05 mm between current font sizes and those defined using the X size. You can also mention that 3 characters would all that would be required for the presentation of font sizes (the theoretical maximum size being 999 X - or ~10 cm - I don't think there are available fonts which are bigger than that, but I may be mistaken...). Please, let us know, if you decide to try my suggestion, what he thinks of it. Thanks, Louis. Marcus Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
