Re: What's an em

At 2:17 PM -0800 2/1/00, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>Just van Rossum wrote:
>  >
>  > (Don't ever start measuring letters: it's a dead end, since it's not exact
>  > by definition. Take two simple lowercase letters 'o', one light, one very
>  > heavy. Scale them so they are exactly the same height. View at small size.
>  > The bold one looks smaller.)
>
>That's a good point. I suppose the way around this is to measure the
>glyphs of the normal weight font, and apply the result to the other
>members of the same family (bold, light, italic, etc). Hopefully, all
>members of a family are designed by the same designer, and hopefully
>s/he doesn't introduce randomness at this level (though it seems from
>some comments I have seen on the www-font list that artists love to
>create randomness and to confuse the poor programmers that are trying to
>standardize everything :-)

Funny you should phrase it that way, Erik. You're not familiar with 
Just and Erik (v. Blokland)'s Beowolf? 
<http://www.fontfont.de/packages/beowol475/about475.html>

Hinting is non-random variance. You'll get different metrics 
depending on the ppem size at which you measure: 
<http://style.metrius.com/junk/em.gif>

--
Todd Fahrner

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2000 17:53:43 UTC