After considerable thought and effort I'm hereby sharing this piece with you in the hopes that I can secure your help to submit it to ALL the authorities involved with this issue.
PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF 'ty' (typo) - Whereas there has been too much confusion in the computer industry concerning the mixture of a significant number of units for sizes of fonts, such as points, picas, pixels, inches; or print quality resolution, such as dpi, pixels, dot point measurement, etc, - Whereas there seems not to be an adequate SI prefix that would address all the needs of this industry, or some stakeholders thereof, such as typographers, - Whereas this sector of the economy could greatly benefit from the use of a single convenient "size" that could be applied to all sorts of necessary measurements, such as those described above, - Whereas the industry is lacking of a "unit" that would be "in line" with the SI system, i.e. that would be "coherent and consistent" with it and its principles, We hereby propose to create the typo, which symbol would be ty. Ideally ty would be defined as a decimal power equal to 10^-4 and be incorporated in BIPM's books as an additional prefix. Alternatively, should BIPM and "sister" authorities reject the inclusion of yet another prefix, the ty would be set to 10^-4 m. The above entity would successfully replace all font size definitions, print quality requirements, and any other measurement sensitive requirements that the industry may use. Current font structuring, definition and design would be replaced by a "typo grid". All measurement sensitive devices and products would be from this day forward referred to in terms of ty. The examples below demonstrate the significant advantages of this entity. dpi - if dpi is a linear concept, say, 9600 dpi, would be replaced by 38 dpty (for the purists this should be d/tym, or just tym^-1), NOTE: Ideally the industry would start producing scanners etc with nice round values for dpty, like 40, 80, 160, etc. paper sizes - A4 could be "sold" as 2 102 by 2 973 ty; 8.5" by 11" would be sold as 2 159 by 2 794 ty, picas, points, pixels... - no more need for any of these, all would be replaced by font sizes in ty. The advantage of ty as far as software is concerned is the fact that it would not require decimal points and 4 digits would be more than enough to cover its spectrum of potential sizes, dot pitch (for monitors) - values like 0.28 mm would be reported as 2.8 ty (ideally they could start producing monitors with nice, round ty values, like 3, 2, etc), monitor sizes - they'd be stated in ty, example: 17" => 4 318 ty (ideally the industry would start producing monitors with nice, round *real* number of ty), monitor setup - instead of using, say 800 by 600, they'd be stated as 2 820 by 2 117 (ideally the industry would again start producing resolutions that would produce nice round numbers, like 2 800 by 2 100), chip boards - instead of using 0.1" grids, they could probably move to 25 ty grids (ok, ok... just a thought... ;-) ), pixels (for digital cameras) - the'd by replaced by the equivalent in ty. Example, 5 megapixels would be 62 Mty, (Any other example?...) As of this date, 2002 May 13... There you have it. Please feel free to help me amend this proposal to some more... officially appealing version and I'll submit it to ALL stakeholders involved. Thanks for anyone's help and contribution. Marcus Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
