[TerryP]

I personally find this discussion intently interesting, but someone disrespectful of me to have (seemingly) hijacked drhowarddrfine's thread with it. For that I am sorry drhowarddrfine: even if you've joined us ;-)


If no one has any objections, especially the OP, I really think a Moderator should split most of the points/ems/px stuff off into a separate thread.


------ my reply


I don't know about everyone, but I quite like the concept of a "Point" for print, it's fairly unique and to the point. Just like the word font is within its domain, unlike say using the millimetre to describe the dimensions of a letter on the page. When the document is meant for print-form: I usually think in points and generate either PDF or PS output from my .tex files. I almost never print them, but treat them as printer output. You could say tex output like digital paper.


With a webpage, I try to focus on content and leave styles to later. Most of the stuff I do will downgrade to looking nice in lynx: both because I want it to and because I don't care if they look snazy or not, as long as I like the page itself. I typically tune the standard fonts in a web browser to match my tastes on a specific display and OS, an example might be: 12pt Terminus for mono-spaced text.


If I just want text to generally be of a different proportion of size from the regular font-size, I often settle for the keyword sizes. As long as it doesn't break my layout and I'm not being paid for it, people can generally kiss my grits if their browser doesn't get it *just* right lol. If I want text to just be larger then normal, but have no idea what size the base font will be; then I go for smaller/larger etc. The em unit in CSS is relative to the current font size. So if I actually care how the text size comes out, I usually use em's because the computated value of N em should change if text changes from, say 10px to 16px in sice without my anticipation, it should still be N*size.


My reference defines the a point as 1/72 inch, a pica of 12pt, and a pixel of 1 dot on the computer screen. If I wanted to be as precise as a dot on the computer screen in my font size, I would print the thing instead of using a web browser to view it on my screen !!!





That's why I rarely use pt/px for webstuff, and why I usually don't muck with fonts a lot in HTML/CSS. And just for the record, the only time I've *ever* had to change a page because of wrong rendering from what was intended, was in IE7 on a very simple page ;-). I don't consider myself skilled in web page design and wouldn't want to be if it meant compromising my opinion that the web should be for all, not look sexy under very specific criteria that could change like a fart in the wind (nor do I want to go nuts trying to appease all in a balancing act, because if you try to appease everyone, you'll probably piss them all off imho!)