Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Jan 15, 2010, at 20:27 , Brad Kemper wrote:
>> In both printed and electronic 'billboard' displays, a CSS inch may be much larger, therefore, than a physical inch, so that a CSS pixel subtends the expected angle at the eye for the typical viewer.
> 
> My view is that in print, an inch is an inch is an inch, unless it is scaled explicitly (in the print options, for instance), in hand or not. In print, it is the physical dimensions that you can actually count on to be true, and I don't want to change that. Thus, you can create a 360in layout on the screen, zoom way out to see the whole thing, see what a 120px border looks like on it, then print it out at actual size using a huge-format ink hose printer, and the proportions will be maintained. And no one has to guess if looks better at 2 city blocks away or 1 block away. 



OK.  Whereas I can just about see that people may put 'arbitrary' web pages on an electronic display (and thus they should 'work' and not present a tiny postage stamp in the top-left corner), the interop questions for printed billboards are probably...non-existent.  Who takes a page designed for 'general web' use and expects it to print to a billboard?  If there is such a person, they'll only print once without scaling it up to fit, and that once they'll see a tiny postage stamp in the top-left corner.  Since there are probably no cases in the general-web-to-printed-billboard class, whether we make that class consistent with large displays (as I did) or with print (as you did) is probably immaterial.

  
David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Saturday, 16 January 2010 18:35:47 UTC