Re: "em" should be horizontal, "ex" vertical

On Jul 20, 11:29pm, Hakon Lie wrote:

> Lee wrote
>  > While that's a good definition, typesetting practice /never/ uses "em"
>  > as vertical measurement; an em is a horizontal measurement only, and an
>  > "ex" is the vertical measurement.


So why the term 'em square'?

>  >  This makes measurements based on
>  > fonts size work with compressed an/or fat fonts.

That is a reasonable point. However, in CSS1, a highly stretched 12pt
font and a highly condensed 12pt font would both have an em size
of -- 12pt. So, that case already works.



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 21 July 1997 10:09:24 UTC