7 ms·

A 12pt Font Should Be The Same Size Everywhere

101 points by kickingvegas 14y ago

xmmx 14y ago
This will lead to more harm than good. Sure, designers can use it to their advantage to create great pages, but some people who don't account for this will make their websites so their 12mm font looks great on their 4000px monitor but everything looks fuzzy on my 1024 px screen. And oh god the scrolling when I try to use my ipod touch to browse the site.
- gcb 14y ago
  that's what they do already. i'm totally missing your point. How does this not happen with px? and with em and % being also based on px...
gcb 14y ago
i was fighting with the same thing the other day... then i realized, i do not look at my 24" monitor at the same distance then i look at my 4" phone screen. So, which size should the font be if i'm designing for both those screens? pt sure isn't the answer. this being only tangentially related to the topic :) so, back on topic, yes, i wholeheartedly agree that pt should mean what it mean. it's just retarded that it's not. and you are not even accounting for TVs which cut random portions of the displayed image for no reason, making this even harder to calculate the real dpi.
- ajross 14y ago
  Ironically there is a straightforward answer: arc distance. What angle does the font (or pixel, or whatever you're trying to scale) subtend from the position of your eye? This works always. It's sometimes hard to define for some devices (e.g. TV's, which might be used a widely varying distances), but even then the world has come up with standard conventions (e.g. assume you're 10' from your 40" TV, assume your phone is about 12" away, assume the controls in your car are at a 30" arm length...). And, of course, it's not implemented anywhere. So we all suffer with "dpi" and "px".
  - Someone 14y ago
    According to CSS 2.1, px _should_ be defined in terms of an angle: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx.
    - ajross 14y ago
      That's fun. Obviously that's not how it works, 1px is 1 physical pixel everywhere I've ever seen. Think of how much would break if something decided to do this "right" ...
      - cma 14y ago
        On retina displays it is two pixels.
        thebigshane 14y ago
        I haven't paid too much attention to this but shouldn't it be a square of four pixels? That would be true double resolution, right? Or is there some pixel trickery like those olpc displays? [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display]
        reitzensteinm 14y ago
        px is a measure of length, not area. A 12 px high font is 24 px high on a retina display. A 12 px by 12 px box is 144 px^2, or 12 x 12 x 2 x 2 = 576 px^2 on retina.
  - repsilat 14y ago
    This works for head-mounted/heads-up displays, too, making it somewhat more future-proof.
  - gcb 14y ago
    Thanks for giving me yet something else tocurse browsers for.
- sp332 14y ago
  I don't think points is a good fit for that. A point has a defined length, 1/72 of an inch. If you don't want your text to be 12/72 of an inch, don't specify the size in points.
  - gcb 14y ago
    What? That is not the case with any browser. Nor with any software as the article points out. Would be awesome if it was...
    - sp332 14y ago
      Since the invention of desktop publishing, PostScript points have been 72 to the inch. Resolution-independent rendering was taken into consideration in the 80's. If a "point" is not 1/72 of an inch then it's rendered wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29
      - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
        That's kind of what the article is pointing out...
- zokier 14y ago
  >So, which size should the font be if i'm designing for both those screens? pt sure isn't the answer. I think the "small", "medium", "large" etc would be the best choice. Those by definition should be always the correct size.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
It would be nice, won't happen of course but here is to hoping. The challenge isn't typography, its people. People who want their document to be as wide as their phone on a phone and as wide as their tablet on a tablet, and not quite as wide as their screen on their desktop or laptop. If you force them tom compute their 'zoom factor' they get annoyed. People who give them what they want, get their business. And typography continues to suffer.
- gcb 14y ago
  That's not the point of the article. If it's badly used or not is not discussed. The point is that even if it could cure cancer, it's not possible to be done on any display.
wmf 14y ago
You seem to be taking it as given that the size of stuff should match between different displays, but you don't give any reason why that's desirable. I understand the argument for 1:1 WYSIWYG in DTP, but not for UI. I haven't been doing much DTP in the last decade. Some people prefer larger UI and some prefer smaller — partly due to differences in vision and partly just preference — and today's industry lets them choose. Your proposal takes away that choice and thus is guaranteed to anger people.
- nkwiatek 14y ago
  First of all, whether or not something offends people is rarely the best reason to do something. Secondly, "choice" is a generous way to describe it. It's more that sizes are happening of basically their own will, whether the user likes it or not. At least if inch measurements were respected, the designer could be deliberate about a decision. This would not invalidate user stylesheets or zooming; I can't fathom a single disadvantage here.
  - wmf 14y ago
    I'm more concerned about UI widgets where user stylesheets and zooming tend to not exist (and zooming would produce blurriness if it was used).
- gcb 14y ago
  People may want to see pictures of products in 1:1 scale in webstores. I would.
brittohalloran 14y ago
Github repo as blog post?!?! Hows that for some transparency in your edits: https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-everywhere/commits/master https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...
- jherdman 14y ago
  And if you want to get really fancy, there's Github Pages -- http://pages.github.com/ http://pages.github.com/. So, you get all of the benefits of the repo approach, but your pages can be all sexy and stylish.
PaulHoule 14y ago
scary... my experience is that the more platforms try to get this kind of thing right, the more they get it wrong. back in the 90's, photoshop would try to do all sorts of gamma correction on images you were editing with the consequence that, if you didn't turn it off and make sure it was always turned off, you'd get your colors wrong 100% of the time. a system like that working requires that all the pieces be correctly configured, and the consequence is that instead of having something that's 4.1 inches on one platform and 5.2 on another, you have something that's 12.7 inches on one platform and 1.4 on another.
- gcb 14y ago
  Gimp had the only cheap effective, backward compatible solution: There was a setting that showed a ruler in the screen, you could scale it to match a ruler you were holding against the screen. It disappeared after a while...
  - ralph 14y ago
    I don't think this would be necessary if folks ensured their X server's Screens' resolutions were configured correctly. $ xdpyinfo | grep -A 2 '^screen #' screen #0: dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (483x272 millimeters) resolution: 101x101 dots per inch $ The all X clients would know how many pixels represented a physical measurement on the screen.
    - gcb 14y ago
      And how do you configure it? most lcd manufacturers put wrong info on labels and dmp info
      - ralph 14y ago
        One uses Option "DPI" "96 x 96" in an xorg.conf or similar file; this overrides DDC from the monitor. Note, not all monitors have the same density of pixels in both directions. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_DPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_D... has more.
crazygringo 14y ago
Well yes, 12pt should be the same everywhere, but points are a terrible unit of measurement for anything computer-related. Points are useful on paper only. They should only exist in the context of word processing and like, where we expect things to be printed in an actual physical size, with 72 points to an inch. For computer interfaces or web documents, we just need some kind of measurement that is a relatively known proportion to the computer or browser's interface. Fortunately, CSS "px" does that rather well -- it doesn't indicate physical pixels, but rather logical pixels, and we all know what "16px" text looks like relative to our OS, and it works great. And happily, people rarely use "pt" in CSS, and in my opinion it should never have been an option in the first place.
- sp332 14y ago
  CSS isn't just for screens, you know. There are also media types that include print, where points really would make sense.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Or audio. Can you tell me what 12pt font sounds like? http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- endtwist 14y ago
  That's like telling me points are a terrible unit of measurement for print because we use different sizes of paper and points should be relative to the paper size. The whole goal of points is that a point is a point is a point, regardless of whether I'm printing on a business card or a billboard. Why can't we have that uniformity for digital devices, too?
  - Scene_Cast2 14y ago
    Just curious, but why not inches / cm instead of points?
homer-simpson 14y ago
For your reading pleasure, here is (imho totally flawed) argument by one Mozilla guy who thinks otherwise: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-units_12.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-unit...
wnoise 14y ago
No. I want to be able to make slides that work on projectors. The only unit able to handle this would be "angle based on standard viewing distance", which will require markedly different "actual lengths" for different devices.
- Cushman 14y ago
  It has been pointed out before that the CSS `px` is such a unit: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx (Although I seem to recall the discussion here was skeptical of the idea.)
silon3 14y ago
For the web, users must be able to override font size independently of layout (all fonts, not just some of them). Zoom text only feature in Firefox makes it much better than Chrome for me (even IE has a really poor man's implementation of this).
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Huh? I sit at a different distance from my monitor than my phone is from my face. I buy high resolution monitors, not because I want the "OMG the circle is a smoother circle" sense of a Retina display but because I want greater density. If we're nitpicking about "pt" in particular, fine. But if we're saying we should design UI elements and text specifically so that it's always the same size, count me completely out.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dpark 14y ago
This sounds like a good idea at first[1], but then you realize that text is often accompanied by graphics that are not vectorized. Resolution independence when coupled with raster images is a hard problem. You can render the text at the desired size fairly easily, but you can't resize a bitmap arbitrarily without it looking pretty terrible. This is why resolution independence hasn't happened for displays despite lots of attention. It's also why Apple just doubled everything to keep it simpler. [1] Actually, it might not even seem like a great idea at first if your first thought is to contrast your phone screen and TV screen.
teilo 14y ago
"Font-hinting becomes less necessary at 200 PPI and higher." Umm, no. Font hinting is still important at 300 DPI, so it's also still important at 200 PPI.
px1999 14y ago
I don't think I see the point, aside from for historical reasons and printing (though that one's already been solved quite thoroughly...) The beauty of electronic displays is that they can be tailored to your specific wants and needs. If I want to view your text, I should be able to view it at a size that's comfortable to me on whatever device I want to read it on. If I'm not reading it, and am instead waiting for updates, I should be able to scale it down and put it somewhere in my workspace that doesn't take up too much room or distract me. To have an edict that says 12pt must always be 0.4233cm or 0.16777in (quite a ridiculous measurement) achieves nothing. What if I want to display the resource you built for display at 12pt on a 24 inch monitor? A 6 inch phone? A projector? What if I have bad vision and want it larger? Suddenly, 12pt needs to get multiplied by some arbitrary factor and it's lost all of its usefulness again. My expedient excuse is that it's not necessary unless you're dealing with something static and physical.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Good point. Viewing distance needs to be taken into account. There is no reason this can't be solved though. How about instead of [m] we start thinking about the angle at which a an object falls into our retinas? Instead of pt or mm we could define fonts and distances in •.
- asdfsdafds 14y ago
  The basic solution is fairly simple (and I'm surprised there's not much mention of it here): use something other than "point". In an ideal world, there would be three measures: Points/inches/mm/etc. - used only for displaying content which must match the physical world. For the most part, this means "page preview" and when you want to display some image at "actual size". Arcseconds/radians/etc. - used for displaying content that is intended to fill a certain field of view. The vast majority of content. Pixels - used for fitting to pixel grids and 1:1 display, or other scenarios where scaling artifacts are not acceptable. There is a considerable deal of fiddling to do with this, especially with regards to user-configurable scaling (which would be extremely important for arcseconds/etc., given that field of view depends on distance to device), but the basic need for some angular measure seems obvious.
- 14y ago
abalone 14y ago
"My appeal is to software and hardware developers to ensure that a 12 point font will be rendered the same size everywhere, regardless of screen size and density." This is a not very well reasoned appeal. If it were implemented, every Keynote presentation would be unreadably small when projected onto the big screen, literally the same size as the presenter holding up a piece of paper for the audience to read with their binoculars. Likewise, no more than a few characters at a time would be visible on a phone. There is simply no serious counteragument; nobody can say making things unviewable would be a step forward. The best you can do is complain that the name of the units is misleading. Fine. So what about introducing a new unit that is truly faithful to a real world measuring stick? You can argue for that all you want, but guess what? Nobody in their right mind would actually use it, outside of exotic scenarios, because generally you want to avoid the above effects. You want your user interface to be visible to users at different screen sizes meant to be viewed from different distances. Thus, even if we were to introduce a new "TruePoint" or "TrueInch" unit, it would be largely.. and I beg you to excuse the pun here.. pointless.
- Jach 14y ago
  I agree about the physical rendering size always being the same for a point, a point should be more general, but I still think there is some utility for having things defined in real-world units showing up as real-world units when measured on glass in the same z. An inch is an inch, and if it's too big for the display it should be clipped and if it's 100 feet away it should be unreadable. It would be useful for classes of devices--instead of special casing for resolutions, ratios, and densities, special case for desktops/laptops, phones, tablets, home projectors, conference projectors, etc. But what's really missing is the explicit presence of a projection surface and the ability to adjust the factors that go into the calculation when projecting. It would be nice to have a unit that lets you say "I want this item to be as tall as the subjective inch if a person holds a ruler one foot away from them." That way no matter how close or far away I'm looking at the item (assuming the display is large enough--too small and too far will get it clipped, too few pixels will get it blocky), if I hold a ruler one foot away from me the item will be "as tall" as the ruler's inch mark. (Edit: I'm having fun trying to visualize a powerful enough 64x2 display built on a mountain. Where I grew up, there is just a single letter. From afar: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Little_mountain_utah.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Little_mountai... And from on top of it: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QeeaDcCiD4o/TexykEujKiI/AAAAAAAAHRA/DQSDreeonko/s320/2011+1914.JPG http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QeeaDcCiD4o/TexykEujKiI/AAAAAAAAHR...)
splicer 14y ago
A point is not necessarily 1/72 inches. TeX, for example, uses 1/72.27 by default. See http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm for details on the different definitions of points. Even once you've settled on a definition of point as a unit of length, there's still the problem of defining what a "12 pt font" means; does it refer to the cap height, the length of an em-dash, or something else?
lstroud 14y ago
Shouldn't we just switch to dimensional measurements like millimeters, inches, etc and expect the operating system to use whatever metric it chooses to make it display size appropriate (pt, px, em, etc)? I think the problem with this is that developers (me included) have enjoyed using resolution to to change the physical size components in order to gain screen real estate. Perhaps, shifting to a zoom/scale setting would be a better approach than tying ourselves to resolution. Humorously, it would be kinda like a print guy measuring font size in fibers and the size of the type changing based on fiber density. :-P Then again, they probably do that.

101 points by kickingvegas 14y ago

xmmx 14y ago

This will lead to more harm than good. Sure, designers can use it to their advantage to create great pages, but some people who don't account for this will make their websites so their 12mm font looks great on their 4000px monitor but everything looks fuzzy on my 1024 px screen. And oh god the scrolling when I try to use my ipod touch to browse the site.

gcb 14y ago
that's what they do already. i'm totally missing your point. How does this not happen with px? and with em and % being also based on px...

gcb 14y ago

i was fighting with the same thing the other day... then i realized, i do not look at my 24" monitor at the same distance then i look at my 4" phone screen. So, which size should the font be if i'm designing for both those screens? pt sure isn't the answer. this being only tangentially related to the topic :) so, back on topic, yes, i wholeheartedly agree that pt should mean what it mean. it's just retarded that it's not. and you are not even accounting for TVs which cut random portions of the displayed image for no reason, making this even harder to calculate the real dpi.

ajross 14y ago
Ironically there is a straightforward answer: arc distance. What angle does the font (or pixel, or whatever you're trying to scale) subtend from the position of your eye? This works always. It's sometimes hard to define for some devices (e.g. TV's, which might be used a widely varying distances), but even then the world has come up with standard conventions (e.g. assume you're 10' from your 40" TV, assume your phone is about 12" away, assume the controls in your car are at a 30" arm length...). And, of course, it's not implemented anywhere. So we all suffer with "dpi" and "px".
- Someone 14y ago
  According to CSS 2.1, px _should_ be defined in terms of an angle: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx.
  - ajross 14y ago
    That's fun. Obviously that's not how it works, 1px is 1 physical pixel everywhere I've ever seen. Think of how much would break if something decided to do this "right" ...
    - cma 14y ago
      On retina displays it is two pixels.
      - thebigshane 14y ago
        I haven't paid too much attention to this but shouldn't it be a square of four pixels? That would be true double resolution, right? Or is there some pixel trickery like those olpc displays? [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display]
        reitzensteinm 14y ago
        px is a measure of length, not area. A 12 px high font is 24 px high on a retina display. A 12 px by 12 px box is 144 px^2, or 12 x 12 x 2 x 2 = 576 px^2 on retina.
- repsilat 14y ago
  This works for head-mounted/heads-up displays, too, making it somewhat more future-proof.
- gcb 14y ago
  Thanks for giving me yet something else tocurse browsers for.
sp332 14y ago
I don't think points is a good fit for that. A point has a defined length, 1/72 of an inch. If you don't want your text to be 12/72 of an inch, don't specify the size in points.
- gcb 14y ago
  What? That is not the case with any browser. Nor with any software as the article points out. Would be awesome if it was...
  - sp332 14y ago
    Since the invention of desktop publishing, PostScript points have been 72 to the inch. Resolution-independent rendering was taken into consideration in the 80's. If a "point" is not 1/72 of an inch then it's rendered wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      That's kind of what the article is pointing out...
zokier 14y ago
>So, which size should the font be if i'm designing for both those screens? pt sure isn't the answer. I think the "small", "medium", "large" etc would be the best choice. Those by definition should be always the correct size.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

It would be nice, won't happen of course but here is to hoping. The challenge isn't typography, its people. People who want their document to be as wide as their phone on a phone and as wide as their tablet on a tablet, and not quite as wide as their screen on their desktop or laptop. If you force them tom compute their 'zoom factor' they get annoyed. People who give them what they want, get their business. And typography continues to suffer.

gcb 14y ago
That's not the point of the article. If it's badly used or not is not discussed. The point is that even if it could cure cancer, it's not possible to be done on any display.

wmf 14y ago

You seem to be taking it as given that the size of stuff should match between different displays, but you don't give any reason why that's desirable. I understand the argument for 1:1 WYSIWYG in DTP, but not for UI. I haven't been doing much DTP in the last decade. Some people prefer larger UI and some prefer smaller — partly due to differences in vision and partly just preference — and today's industry lets them choose. Your proposal takes away that choice and thus is guaranteed to anger people.

nkwiatek 14y ago
First of all, whether or not something offends people is rarely the best reason to do something. Secondly, "choice" is a generous way to describe it. It's more that sizes are happening of basically their own will, whether the user likes it or not. At least if inch measurements were respected, the designer could be deliberate about a decision. This would not invalidate user stylesheets or zooming; I can't fathom a single disadvantage here.
- wmf 14y ago
  I'm more concerned about UI widgets where user stylesheets and zooming tend to not exist (and zooming would produce blurriness if it was used).
gcb 14y ago
People may want to see pictures of products in 1:1 scale in webstores. I would.

brittohalloran 14y ago

Github repo as blog post?!?! Hows that for some transparency in your edits: https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-everywhere/commits/master https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...

jherdman 14y ago
And if you want to get really fancy, there's Github Pages -- http://pages.github.com/ http://pages.github.com/. So, you get all of the benefits of the repo approach, but your pages can be all sexy and stylish.

PaulHoule 14y ago

scary... my experience is that the more platforms try to get this kind of thing right, the more they get it wrong. back in the 90's, photoshop would try to do all sorts of gamma correction on images you were editing with the consequence that, if you didn't turn it off and make sure it was always turned off, you'd get your colors wrong 100% of the time. a system like that working requires that all the pieces be correctly configured, and the consequence is that instead of having something that's 4.1 inches on one platform and 5.2 on another, you have something that's 12.7 inches on one platform and 1.4 on another.

gcb 14y ago
Gimp had the only cheap effective, backward compatible solution: There was a setting that showed a ruler in the screen, you could scale it to match a ruler you were holding against the screen. It disappeared after a while...
- ralph 14y ago
  I don't think this would be necessary if folks ensured their X server's Screens' resolutions were configured correctly. $ xdpyinfo | grep -A 2 '^screen #' screen #0: dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (483x272 millimeters) resolution: 101x101 dots per inch $ The all X clients would know how many pixels represented a physical measurement on the screen.
  - gcb 14y ago
    And how do you configure it? most lcd manufacturers put wrong info on labels and dmp info
    - ralph 14y ago
      One uses Option "DPI" "96 x 96" in an xorg.conf or similar file; this overrides DDC from the monitor. Note, not all monitors have the same density of pixels in both directions. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_DPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Display_Size_and_D... has more.

crazygringo 14y ago

Well yes, 12pt should be the same everywhere, but points are a terrible unit of measurement for anything computer-related. Points are useful on paper only. They should only exist in the context of word processing and like, where we expect things to be printed in an actual physical size, with 72 points to an inch. For computer interfaces or web documents, we just need some kind of measurement that is a relatively known proportion to the computer or browser's interface. Fortunately, CSS "px" does that rather well -- it doesn't indicate physical pixels, but rather logical pixels, and we all know what "16px" text looks like relative to our OS, and it works great. And happily, people rarely use "pt" in CSS, and in my opinion it should never have been an option in the first place.

sp332 14y ago
CSS isn't just for screens, you know. There are also media types that include print, where points really would make sense.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Or audio. Can you tell me what 12pt font sounds like? http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
endtwist 14y ago
That's like telling me points are a terrible unit of measurement for print because we use different sizes of paper and points should be relative to the paper size. The whole goal of points is that a point is a point is a point, regardless of whether I'm printing on a business card or a billboard. Why can't we have that uniformity for digital devices, too?
- Scene_Cast2 14y ago
  Just curious, but why not inches / cm instead of points?

homer-simpson 14y ago

For your reading pleasure, here is (imho totally flawed) argument by one Mozilla guy who thinks otherwise: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-units_12.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-unit...

wnoise 14y ago

No. I want to be able to make slides that work on projectors. The only unit able to handle this would be "angle based on standard viewing distance", which will require markedly different "actual lengths" for different devices.

Cushman 14y ago
It has been pointed out before that the CSS `px` is such a unit: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx (Although I seem to recall the discussion here was skeptical of the idea.)

silon3 14y ago

For the web, users must be able to override font size independently of layout (all fonts, not just some of them). Zoom text only feature in Firefox makes it much better than Chrome for me (even IE has a really poor man's implementation of this).

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Huh? I sit at a different distance from my monitor than my phone is from my face. I buy high resolution monitors, not because I want the "OMG the circle is a smoother circle" sense of a Retina display but because I want greater density. If we're nitpicking about "pt" in particular, fine. But if we're saying we should design UI elements and text specifically so that it's always the same size, count me completely out.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dpark 14y ago

This sounds like a good idea at first[1], but then you realize that text is often accompanied by graphics that are not vectorized. Resolution independence when coupled with raster images is a hard problem. You can render the text at the desired size fairly easily, but you can't resize a bitmap arbitrarily without it looking pretty terrible. This is why resolution independence hasn't happened for displays despite lots of attention. It's also why Apple just doubled everything to keep it simpler. [1] Actually, it might not even seem like a great idea at first if your first thought is to contrast your phone screen and TV screen.

teilo 14y ago

"Font-hinting becomes less necessary at 200 PPI and higher." Umm, no. Font hinting is still important at 300 DPI, so it's also still important at 200 PPI.

px1999 14y ago

I don't think I see the point, aside from for historical reasons and printing (though that one's already been solved quite thoroughly...) The beauty of electronic displays is that they can be tailored to your specific wants and needs. If I want to view your text, I should be able to view it at a size that's comfortable to me on whatever device I want to read it on. If I'm not reading it, and am instead waiting for updates, I should be able to scale it down and put it somewhere in my workspace that doesn't take up too much room or distract me. To have an edict that says 12pt must always be 0.4233cm or 0.16777in (quite a ridiculous measurement) achieves nothing. What if I want to display the resource you built for display at 12pt on a 24 inch monitor? A 6 inch phone? A projector? What if I have bad vision and want it larger? Suddenly, 12pt needs to get multiplied by some arbitrary factor and it's lost all of its usefulness again. My expedient excuse is that it's not necessary unless you're dealing with something static and physical.

DeepDuh 14y ago
Good point. Viewing distance needs to be taken into account. There is no reason this can't be solved though. How about instead of [m] we start thinking about the angle at which a an object falls into our retinas? Instead of pt or mm we could define fonts and distances in •.
asdfsdafds 14y ago
The basic solution is fairly simple (and I'm surprised there's not much mention of it here): use something other than "point". In an ideal world, there would be three measures: Points/inches/mm/etc. - used only for displaying content which must match the physical world. For the most part, this means "page preview" and when you want to display some image at "actual size". Arcseconds/radians/etc. - used for displaying content that is intended to fill a certain field of view. The vast majority of content. Pixels - used for fitting to pixel grids and 1:1 display, or other scenarios where scaling artifacts are not acceptable. There is a considerable deal of fiddling to do with this, especially with regards to user-configurable scaling (which would be extremely important for arcseconds/etc., given that field of view depends on distance to device), but the basic need for some angular measure seems obvious.
14y ago

abalone 14y ago

"My appeal is to software and hardware developers to ensure that a 12 point font will be rendered the same size everywhere, regardless of screen size and density." This is a not very well reasoned appeal. If it were implemented, every Keynote presentation would be unreadably small when projected onto the big screen, literally the same size as the presenter holding up a piece of paper for the audience to read with their binoculars. Likewise, no more than a few characters at a time would be visible on a phone. There is simply no serious counteragument; nobody can say making things unviewable would be a step forward. The best you can do is complain that the name of the units is misleading. Fine. So what about introducing a new unit that is truly faithful to a real world measuring stick? You can argue for that all you want, but guess what? Nobody in their right mind would actually use it, outside of exotic scenarios, because generally you want to avoid the above effects. You want your user interface to be visible to users at different screen sizes meant to be viewed from different distances. Thus, even if we were to introduce a new "TruePoint" or "TrueInch" unit, it would be largely.. and I beg you to excuse the pun here.. pointless.

Jach 14y ago
I agree about the physical rendering size always being the same for a point, a point should be more general, but I still think there is some utility for having things defined in real-world units showing up as real-world units when measured on glass in the same z. An inch is an inch, and if it's too big for the display it should be clipped and if it's 100 feet away it should be unreadable. It would be useful for classes of devices--instead of special casing for resolutions, ratios, and densities, special case for desktops/laptops, phones, tablets, home projectors, conference projectors, etc. But what's really missing is the explicit presence of a projection surface and the ability to adjust the factors that go into the calculation when projecting. It would be nice to have a unit that lets you say "I want this item to be as tall as the subjective inch if a person holds a ruler one foot away from them." That way no matter how close or far away I'm looking at the item (assuming the display is large enough--too small and too far will get it clipped, too few pixels will get it blocky), if I hold a ruler one foot away from me the item will be "as tall" as the ruler's inch mark. (Edit: I'm having fun trying to visualize a powerful enough 64x2 display built on a mountain. Where I grew up, there is just a single letter. From afar: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Little_mountain_utah.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Little_mountai... And from on top of it: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QeeaDcCiD4o/TexykEujKiI/AAAAAAAAHRA/DQSDreeonko/s320/2011+1914.JPG http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QeeaDcCiD4o/TexykEujKiI/AAAAAAAAHR...)

splicer 14y ago

A point is not necessarily 1/72 inches. TeX, for example, uses 1/72.27 by default. See http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm for details on the different definitions of points. Even once you've settled on a definition of point as a unit of length, there's still the problem of defining what a "12 pt font" means; does it refer to the cap height, the length of an em-dash, or something else?

lstroud 14y ago

Shouldn't we just switch to dimensional measurements like millimeters, inches, etc and expect the operating system to use whatever metric it chooses to make it display size appropriate (pt, px, em, etc)? I think the problem with this is that developers (me included) have enjoyed using resolution to to change the physical size components in order to gain screen real estate. Perhaps, shifting to a zoom/scale setting would be a better approach than tying ourselves to resolution. Humorously, it would be kinda like a print guy measuring font size in fibers and the size of the type changing based on fiber density. :-P Then again, they probably do that.