Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

If we're going to give up the "physical" meaning of pt, and redefine it as 4/3px, then I suggest that we should - for the sake of consistency and designers' sanity - redefine all the "physical" units in the same way, so that 1in remains 72pt, etc. So pc, in, cm, mm, and perhaps a few others (I haven't checked the list) will all change in a coherent way.

For those specialized use cases such as "life size" drawings, touch interface elements, etc., where a certain physical size really is intended - rather than a physical size that made sense on a typical computer monitor or a piece of paper, but should be appropriately scaled when viewing from 6 inches on a phone - I propose that we introduce a new keyword "true". This may be prefixed to any of these existing units, and means that the dimension IS to be interpreted as a true physical size, not scaled according to display size/resolution. (Though it would of course still be subject to overall zooming of the entire laid-out page.)

If allowing an extra optional keyword between the number and units is syntactically difficult, we could instead define new units "truept", "truein", "truecm", etc.

JK

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2010 23:48:04 UTC