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> So you are saying you would want one physical square inch on a phone to be the exact same size one square inch on a projector screen? If they're not the same
by recursive 9y ago
> So you are saying you would want one physical square inch on a phone to be the exact same size one square inch on a projector screen?
If they're not the same, then they're not inches.
- wlesieutre 9y agoRight, the argument is that if you want some arbitrary sizes you should get a new unit for it, not inconsistently use an existing unit to mean something that it doesn't. The current system of pts or inches varying by context would be like if an oven manufacturer said "Well, 60°F is pretty warm, and 90°F is downright hot, so we'll just recontextualize those numbers for our oven gauge. Bake cookies for 10 minutes at 80 degrees. Unless you're using some other oven that scaled temperatures differently, in which case bake them at some other temperature instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ One could argue that you really are using inches, it's just that everything ever displayed on a screen has an implied "not to scale" note with it, but I don't think that's a particularly useful argument. Heck, if you're editing something in MS Office it'll show you an 8.5x11 page with a scale meter. Set it to 100% and surely that's to scale. Nope, 100% of some other totally arbitrary scale. That's what you wanted, yeah?
- mannykannot 9y agoThis is why working around a problem rather than fixing it is rarely a good idea.
- lstamour 9y agoIn regards to Microsoft Word, it might be exactly to scale if your monitor happens to be a multiple of 96 DPI: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11050/the-microsoft-surface-studio-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11050/the-microsoft-surface-s...
- mark-r 9y agoMicrosoft Word sizes everything for the printer. What you see on screen is merely an approximation. This actually makes sense, since printers will be more consistent than screens.
- colechristensen 9y agoIf I'm editing a Word document, I'm designing something to be printed. If I set zoom to 100% I expect the screen to display the exact size a paper would. But I'm designing when I'm in Word, it's not necessary or convenient to do all of my work at 1:1 scaling, that's what the ruler is for.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYup. Best way to test it: take a sheet of paper from your printer and put it against your screen; MS Word at 100% zoom should have the document area match the physical paper size.
- jmanderley 9y agoJust tested this: Not even close to being true (current Word/Office 365 on Windows 10)
- falcolas 9y agoIs it word, or the OS scaling (which is where a lot of the current font size sins exist)?
- evilDagmar 9y agoThis requires that Windows knows about the exact size of the display, but Windows cuts a few corners there so it's unlikely to be as precise as an 8.5x11 piece of paper. Compounding the problem is that the operating system relies on the monitor reporting its physical size correctly via EDID and for a lot of vendors (most notoriously Dell) this isn't guaranteed either.
- jcrawfordor 9y agoYou should check out OvenBakes. It's a free service that tries your recipe in dozens of different ovens and then ships you the result so you can check for consistency.
- masklinn 9y ago> Right, the argument is that if you want some arbitrary sizes you should get a new unit for it They already exist (vw and vh are percents of the viewport width and height respectively). Renderers "relativised" supposedly absolute units because 1. they already were not correctly handled (as output devices often don't correctly report their densities and renderers would then just fallback to 72dpi or whatever) and 2. they were ubiquitous.
- gweinberg 9y agoSomething like that. The article may be technically correct, but it's putting the cart way in front of the horse. We shouldn't be using "points" to specify type face size in the first place. Because obviously we don't want type to be the same physical size on all display devices.