Re: A proposal for units in GTK+

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

Oh, I see. 

I think we have the same problem for em and ex, though,
because a regular font and a condensed font with the same
x-height will probably also have the same font-size. Both
measures, em and ex, seem to be more suitable as vertical
units.

That is, unless we do em differently from css and mozilla,
which define it as the font-size (1em = 12pt for a 12pt
font).

I'm not sure it really is a problem though. When designing
web pages, I think of an em as some measure related to the
font size, and don't worry about it much beyond that. So far
it hasn't caused me any strife.

Noah

On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 19:19:10 +0100, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu> writes:
> 
> > Could you explain why "em may not be suitable as a vertical
> > unit if the the x-height of the font is big"? I'm not
> > disagreeing with your conclusion, I think it's probably a
> > good idea to have both em and ex. I just don't understand
> > this sentence and am curious.
> 
> The ex height of a font is the height of the lower-case x. If you have
> a very condensed font, the height of the lower-case x will be big
> compared to the width of the font. By using the ex height as vertical
> unit, and the em width as horizontal unit, your design is more likely
> to match the font you are using
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