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Bullets and tiny text
Authored by: greed on Nov 16, '05 09:12:50AM

There's a problem with point sizes from Windows.

The problem is, Windows doesn't use point sizes. Anytime a font size is specified as "points", Windows interprets it as "pixels".

Every other system currently in use treats "points" as "1/72 of an inch", which is ever so slightly wrong, but close enough for practical use. The display resolution (pixels-per-inch) is then used to convert points to pixels. You can't use the Windows completely incorrect definition of "points" without messing everything else up. I, personally, don't think design bugs should be copied into other systems.

The fix is, as far as I'm concerned, to ignore absolute point sizes and obey only relative sizes from stylesheets and the like. (So, font-size: 10pt or 10px is ignored, but font-size: 1.5em, or 150%, and so on are accepted.) And implement Minimum Font Size like Mozilla and friends have had for a bit now, and has been added to the latest Safari.

For practical use, I hit Cmd-Option-P (I think) to get the Plain Text alternative. If there isn't a Plain Text alternative, and I really can't read it, I tell the sender to re-send without messing with the font size.

Hmmm, maybe I can figure out how to make the Mozilla stylesheet parser Do What I Want....



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Bullets and tiny text
Authored by: lar3ry on Nov 16, '05 10:56:43AM

Technically, font sizes (height) shouldn't be specified in "em" units, since those units measure width. Instead, use "ex" to specify height. ("1.5ex" means 150% the height of the base font.)

CSS allows the use of silly units for any measurement, which gets confusing. The reason, though, is for uniformity: setting a margin top, bottom, width, and height all at "1.5em" would describe a uniform margin around a block.

[sigh]



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