Allegedly, on or about 21 December 2018, Rick Stevens sent: > Note that "sizes" in most word processors or printing-related things > are given in points True. And when done correctly, it's an absolute size. i.e. 12 point text is always the same size, no matter what it's printed on or displayed on. It's predictable. If it's different, you're doing it wrong. > (12 points to the inch, so 24 points is 2 inches or about 5 cm high). Not true. The scale is wrong. 12 point text is a standard mechanical typewriter sized text (usually giving around 10 characters per inch), another standard typewriter size is 12 characters per inch (using 10 point text). It depended on whether your typewriter was Pica (bigger 10 cpi) or Elite (smaller 12 cpi) as to what size a fixed typewriter used. If you had something like the IBM golfball typewriter, or daisywheel printers, you had more sizes to choose from, though the cheaper typewriters were still stuck with 10 or 12 cpi character spacings (so you ended up with spaced or crammed characters). 24 points is only twice as big as common typewriting. Don't believe me? Fire up LibreOffice, try out 12 and 24 point text, and look at the on-screen ruler, or print it out. There's approx 72 of *these* points in an inch. NB: 12 point of this font may be differently sized than 12 point of that font, because there's a height and width difference between them all, and you may be concentrating on height as your prime criteria, but they may have been thinking of width. But they'll be reasonably close. > For display-oriented things such as grub or X or Wayland, sizes > generally are in pixels (which vary depending on the resolution of > the monitor), so 24 is only 24 _pixels_ high. Half true. Some screen systems will take 24 pixel high as being precisely 24 pixels high. Other systems will scale, believing that 24 pixels was traditionally "this big" on their screen, so they'll scale 24 pixels to be similarly sized on another screen. It's a seriously broken system. Scaling pixels is *wrong* thinking, and it's typically scaled by the wrong amount, just to make it worse. It gets messier when someone decides a screen needs even more scaling, because they want to take viewing distance into account (small screen, viewed close, versus big screen on the wall in the distance). They often get it wrong, the distance isn't fixed, and the distance often isn't a parameter that you can set. Things per inch is a badly implemented system on computers. Some things scale, some thing's are badly scaled because people implementing them didn't know what they're doing. On your display screen, it has one resolution, the number of dots per inch that it was built with. It's unchangeable. Your graphic card can usually support a number of resolutions (amounting to how many pixels per microsecond it can output), which will relate to DPI when you take into account the scanning speed of the display. The card can usually adjust its output to adjust for the display (strictly speaking, the system driving it is really the thing doing this). To show 12 point text as 12 point text, a system has to know the size of your screen, and generate the appropriate number of dots in a given space to make it that big. Without all the right data (screen size, dot pitch), it can't do that correctly. Point size should be absolute, computer mis-engineers should not fart around with it. It only has one definition. If the user wants bigger/small text because of their screen size or viewing distance, let the user pick the size they want, don't stupidly mis-scale it. If I want 12 point text to go alongside a 2 inch picture, I need it to do what it's supposed to do. Pixel size should be absolute, computer mis-engineers should not fart around with it. If I specify 12 pixel text, or a 12 pixel box, I've done so on purpose. If my screen is massively big, then I'll pick bigger sizes. If I'm designing something that has to fit proportionally to differing screen sizes (cell phone, computer VDU, projection TV), the using pixel or point sizes are the wrong schemes to use. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 4.16.11-100.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue May 22 20:02:12 UTC 2018 x86_64 Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. Programmers who can't take criticisms shouldn't release software that invites it. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
