Topic: em (Page 1 of 1)

Hi, guys. How are you? Could you help me, pleaes?
I am wondering what *em* does for styles.

quote:

---

By definition, the em unit is the size of the font, which by definition
equals the height of the font. What this really means is usually (at least
roughly) equal to the distance from the lowest descender of the characters
up to the top of the highest ascender, counting diacritics as descenders
or ascenders according to their position. But at the most general level,
we can only say that the size of the font is a quantity assigned to the
font by its designer.

---

This is a quote from my reserch about em. Long time ago, actually I read same sort of definition about em. But I have not been able to understadn actual use of em. I mean I sometimes see setting font size not px but em. How does it work?

And also I found this kind of thing:

padding: 5px 5px 5px 0.5em;

Why do poeple want to do like that? I am sure it is intentional to get some effect. But I cannot get the point.
Could anyone explain it to me, please?

Hiroki Kozai

The purpose of using em measurements is to allow the object being specified in that way to alter it's size/margin/padding/border/etc. along with the text size.

If you have all of your margins specified in em, they will grow as the text size grows (for instance, when the user alters the text size via their browser controls). If you don't they will stay the same while the text grows.



[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 10-26-2003).]

Hi, DL. How are you?
Thanks for your reply.
I gotta!
Cheers.

Hiroki Kozai

the basic principle of 'em' according to my graphic design / typography tutor is that one 'em' is essentially the width of the widest character in the alphabet - the 'M'. The concept however is still a slightly confusing one - but in web terms it's like DL put it so eloquently.

Although outdated this site is always handy on font matters and has a demo page talking about em:
http://style.cleverchimp.com/

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org