Matthew Saltzman wrote:
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Tim wrote:
Tim:
Are the lines the same widths? Point sizing generally refers to
characters per inch across the page.
Richard England:
I don't believe that is true unless it has changed since my days in
actual printing. The character size in points refers to the size from
the highest to the lowest extent of the letters of a given type face
size.
While the "size" of a font is, indeed, the entire size of the font,
points used in typing, generally, were just used as a measure of how
many would fit across a given width (10pt being the common one, 12pt
being the more compact, usually).
A point is 1/72 of an inch, and typface sizes are measured vertically.
Ten-point type is smaller than 12-point type.
Manual and electric typewriters of old usually came with one of two
fixed-width typefaces: Pica (10 chars per inch) and the more compact
Elite (12 cpi). (High-school students liked Pica typewriters better
than Elite because fewer words were needed to fill up that five-page
essay. Today's high-school students use the same trick.) (Adding to
the confusion, a pica is a measure equal to 1/6 of an inch.)
It doesn't make much sense with a variable-width font to talk about
measuring its size in terms of horizontal cpi.
You also have to consider the display medium. DPI and aspect ratio of
the display device can wreak havoc on any document transfered across
systems.
Another consideration that word processor document files are just
storage of something on a particular PC (for later printing, etc.).
They really are not a portable document format. A different PC might
have different fonts, and will probably have a different printer (with
different minimum margins).
The problem of documents looking different on different systems is
indeed due to fonts, at least in large part. The different fonts
usually differ in terms of appearance (of course) and in terms of
average width. Modern printers usually have controllable margins and
one of a few standard dots-per-inch measures (and the information is
recorded in the drivers), so that's not so much of an issue. (Old
daisy-wheel printers were another matter entirely.) The issue is how
typefaces are translated from their vector descriptions to their pixel
representations.
With screens, fonts are measured in points, but when they are drawn,
they are drawn using pixels. The font-drawing systems need to know
the true number of pixels per inch (ppi) in order to get the point
size true. If a system can't detect the ppi and the user doesn't set
it, then the font sizes on screens are likely to be (a) wrong and (b)
different from screen to screen--even when using the same software.
Ok. so explain this ....
Everyone else at work uses StarOffice, I've just been using OpenOffice
on my own machines as it get installed as standard on FC5. I've just
installed StarOffice on FC5, and with StarOffice the documents look and
print the same as every one at work. So it appears to be the Office
software and not OS/X related.
If I print the same document from OpenOffice and StarOffice and hold the
pages on top of each other and up to a light I can see the gradual creep
as one document goes out of sync with the other - but its very slight on
a line by line basis.
Now I thought StarOffice and OpenOffice had the same code base ? So I
would expect the font rendering to be the same.
Andy
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