Thursday, November 02, 2006

Favorite Misanthrope On Font Size

I just checked the Wikipedia definition of a Misanthrope, and it's my spitting image. I'm a benign one.

I hate point sizes as well. They say nothing about the actual font size when used in the context of outputting to a PNG image versus a printer. Sure, a point size is a "size", but bitmaps size differently, depending on the screen resolution so it's pointless to use it in a publishing module where you want everything look exactly the same, regardless of the resolution of the output device used. Pixels or points or twips or mm are all useless in that respect.



What we want is something like characters per page line, or lines per page height. And the publishing process calculates the appropriate font size, so that no matter where you output to, the result always has the same text in the same size, even though wildly different resolutions are used.