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EM and EM

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	[quote]pt should not be used for screen - it's a print u/m[/quote] Your advice may be sound in terms of how browsers currently treat pt's, but allow me to argue against that in principle. A pt is a real-world unit of measure. You could (probably can) make a ruler that measures pt's. Web pages are displayed on monitors which are physical objects in the real world. If the DPI of a monitor is known, then there's no reason that pt's can't be used to measure lengths or text sizes. In fact, if that were done, it would be a really good thing. Why? Consider this: my parents recently bought an incredible 21-inch 1600x1200 LCD monitor. Running an LCD monitor in a non-native resolution is a bad idea because it blurs things. So why do you think they wanted to use it in 1024x768? Because everything in their operating system and on every web page is measured in terms of pixels, and they couldn't stand the small text. I had to change the font size in Windows and get them using Firefox with text zoom simply so that they would be willing to use the monitor's native resolution. Even now, things look pretty ugly in a lot of situations because the graphics around text weren't designed to be viewed at different pixel sizes. If we measured things in real-world units like pt's, then this sort of thing wouldn't be a problem. No matter what resolution or size your monitor was, 12pt font would be 12pt font and would be perfectly readable. Larger monitors would unconditionally mean you could have more on your screen, and higher resolution would mean more detail, like it does in virtually every other use of the word. Of course, one could artificially increase their dpi if they wanted to fit more on the screen and they had a high enough resolution to make out smaller details. So, my point is, this belief that real-world units of measure are harmful when used on screens is flawed, as it limits the user's ability or desire to use better hardware for viewing such things. The usage of relative units of measure such as em is great, as it reflects a desire to let the user decide how they want to view web pages. But it needs to be taken a step farther. If everything were measured in real-world units, then both designers and users would get what they want: designers could predict exactly how their pages would look ("this image is 3 times the text height no matter what"), and users could view them at whatever size is comfortable (by setting their dpi). Anyway, sorry about the rant. In response to the original question: mixing em's with pixels is a good idea (since images have to be measured in pixels (for now) and em's let the user specify their font size), but it also can be difficult to do well. The goal is to let the text size be changed in such a way that it doesn't ruin the layout surrounding it. Loading...
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