3 ms·
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 electro
by 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 agoGood 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 agoThe 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.
- Zak 14y agoI don't think anybody's saying you shouldn't be able to scale anything on your screen - just that "100%" should be the same size on anything. 100% should not necessarily be the default. Fit page width to screen/window seems like the proper default.