Sent by Steven on 19 October 2004 23:11
Arno wrote:
> Maybe a completely stupid question, but can anyone explain to me why Mac
> shows a smaller font?
>
> I understand that the "Mac Standard" can differ, so that undefined
> typographic items show in the standard, but when I make a style sheet and
> appoint a specific piece of text being e.g. 10pt, than the 10pt is an
> absolute value, which should be shown as such.
> In any software, be it Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, XPress, or whatever,
> all 10pt text is as big when the page shows the same percentage of zoom.
> So when I set an absolute website on 800x600 (width x height) and produce in
> there a piece of text written in an absolute 10 pt font, shouldn't that also
> show the same everywhere?
The Mac works with a standard of 72 dpi (ppi really), a PC works with 96
ppi standard. The screen knows nothing of points, inches and such, it
only knows of pixels. So such absolute units are translated to pixels
for display on screen. A point is 1/72 inch. 10 points on a Mac is
translated to 10/72*72 = 10 px on screen. On a PC 10 points translates
to 10/72*96 = 13,3 px on screen.
All current Mac browsers also use the 96 ppi standard so in modern
browsers there should be no difference. But, as others have mentioned,
you should not use ponts for the web.
Use nothing, 100% or 1em for body text and other percentages for
headers, captions etc. If you *must* make body text smaller, don't use
percentages lower than 100% or em values lower than 1 because these
values represent the users preference and you should respect that at all
times (and you don't know what it is, so you are defining text as a
percentage of an unknown which is kinda silly). So if you must control
text size in the initial appearance of the page use pixels and make sure
there is an escape (in the form of an alternate stylesheet) for users
that have a broken brower that can't scale pixels. That's my opinion.
Steven
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