A 12pt Font Should Be The Same Size Everywhere

"My appeal is to software and hardware developers to ensure that a 12 point font will be rendered the same size everywhere, regardless of screen size and density."<p>This is a not very well reasoned appeal. If it were implemented, every Keynote presentation would be unreadably small when projected onto the big screen, literally the same size as the presenter holding up a piece of paper for the audience to read with their binoculars. Likewise, no more than a few characters at a time would be visible on a phone.<p>There is simply no serious counteragument; nobody can say making things unviewable would be a step forward.<p>The best you can do is complain that the <i>name</i> of the units is misleading. Fine. So what about introducing a new unit that is truly faithful to a real world measuring stick? You can argue for that all you want, but guess what? Nobody in their right mind would actually use it, outside of exotic scenarios, because generally you want to avoid the above effects. You want your user interface to be visible to users at different screen sizes meant to be viewed from different distances.<p>Thus, even if we were to introduce a new "TruePoint" or "TrueInch" unit, it would be largely.. and I beg you to excuse the pun here.. pointless.

Well yes, 12pt should be the same everywhere, but points are a terrible unit of measurement for anything computer-related.<p>Points are useful on paper only. They should only exist in the context of word processing and like, where we expect things to be printed in an actual physical size, with 72 points to an inch.<p>For computer interfaces or web documents, we just need some kind of measurement that is a relatively known proportion to the computer or browser's interface. Fortunately, CSS "px" does that rather well -- it doesn't indicate physical pixels, but rather logical pixels, and we all know what "16px" text looks like relative to our OS, and it works great. And happily, people rarely use "pt" in CSS, and in my opinion it should never have been an option in the first place.

You seem to be taking it as given that the size of stuff should match between different displays, but you don't give any reason why that's desirable. I understand the argument for 1:1 WYSIWYG in DTP, but not for UI. I haven't been doing much DTP in the last decade.<p>Some people prefer larger UI and some prefer smaller — partly due to differences in vision and partly just preference — and today's industry lets them choose. Your proposal takes away that choice and thus is guaranteed to anger people.

scary... my experience is that the more platforms try to get this kind of thing right, the more they get it wrong.<p>back in the 90's, photoshop would try to do all sorts of gamma correction on images you were editing with the consequence that, if you didn't turn it off and make sure it was always turned off, you'd get your colors wrong 100% of the time.<p>a system like that working requires that all the pieces be correctly configured, and the consequence is that instead of having something that's 4.1 inches on one platform and 5.2 on another, you have something that's 12.7 inches on one platform and 1.4 on another.

It would be nice, won't happen of course but here is to hoping.<p>The challenge isn't typography, its people. People who want their document to be as wide as their phone on a phone and as wide as their tablet on a tablet, and not quite as wide as their screen on their desktop or laptop. If you force them tom compute their 'zoom factor' they get annoyed. People who give them what they want, get their business. And typography continues to suffer.

Github repo as blog post?!?! Hows that for some transparency in your edits:<p><a href="https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-everywhere/commits/master" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...</a>

This sounds like a good idea at first[1], but then you realize that text is often accompanied by graphics that are not vectorized. Resolution independence when coupled with raster images is a <i>hard problem</i>. You can render the text at the desired size fairly easily, but you can't resize a bitmap arbitrarily without it looking pretty terrible. This is why resolution independence hasn't happened for displays despite lots of attention. It's also why Apple just doubled everything to keep it simpler.<p>[1] Actually, it might not even seem like a great idea at first if your first thought is to contrast your phone screen and TV screen.

I don't think I see the point, aside from for historical reasons and printing (though that one's already been solved quite thoroughly...)<p>The beauty of electronic displays is that they can be tailored to your specific wants and needs. If I want to view your text, I should be able to view it at a size that's comfortable to me on whatever device I want to read it on. If I'm not reading it, and am instead waiting for updates, I should be able to scale it down and put it somewhere in my workspace that doesn't take up too much room or distract me.<p>To have an edict that says 12pt must always be 0.4233cm or 0.16777in (quite a ridiculous measurement) achieves nothing. What if I want to display the resource you built for display at 12pt on a 24 inch monitor? A 6 inch phone? A projector? What if I have bad vision and want it larger? Suddenly, 12pt needs to get multiplied by some arbitrary factor and it's lost all of its usefulness again.<p>My expedient excuse is that it's not necessary unless you're dealing with something static and physical.

This will lead to more harm than good. Sure, designers can use it to their advantage to create great pages, but some people who don't account for this will make their websites so their 12mm font looks great on their 4000px monitor but everything looks fuzzy on my 1024 px screen. And oh god the scrolling when I try to use my ipod touch to browse the site.

For your reading pleasure, here is (imho totally flawed) argument by one Mozilla guy who thinks otherwise:<p><a href="http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-units_12.html" rel="nofollow">http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/css-absolute-length-unit...</a>

Shouldn't we just switch to dimensional measurements like millimeters, inches, etc and expect the operating system to use whatever metric it chooses to make it display size appropriate (pt, px, em, etc)?<p>I think the problem with this is that developers (me included) have enjoyed using resolution to to change the physical size components in order to gain screen real estate. Perhaps, shifting to a zoom/scale setting would be a better approach than tying ourselves to resolution.<p>Humorously, it would be kinda like a print guy measuring font size in fibers and the size of the type changing based on fiber density. :-P Then again, they probably do that.

No. I want to be able to make slides that work on projectors. The only unit able to handle this would be "angle based on standard viewing distance", which will require markedly different "actual lengths" for different devices.

A point is not necessarily 1/72 inches. TeX, for example, uses 1/72.27 by default. See <a href="http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.oberonplace.com/dtp/fonts/point.htm</a> for details on the different definitions of points. Even once you've settled on a definition of point as a unit of length, there's still the problem of defining what a "12 pt font" means; does it refer to the cap height, the length of an em-dash, or something else?

For the web, users must be able to override font size independently of layout (all fonts, not just some of them).<p>Zoom text only feature in Firefox makes it much better than Chrome for me (even IE has a really poor man's implementation of this).

"Font-hinting becomes less necessary at 200 PPI and higher."<p>Umm, no. Font hinting is still important at 300 DPI, so it's also still important at 200 PPI.

i was fighting with the same thing the other day... then i realized, i do not look at my 24" monitor at the same distance then i look at my 4" phone screen.<p>So, which size should the font be if i'm designing for both those screens? pt sure isn't the answer.<p>this being only tangentially related to the topic :) so, back on topic, yes, i wholeheartedly agree that pt should mean what it mean. it's just retarded that it's not. and you are not even accounting for TVs which cut random portions of the displayed image for no reason, making this even harder to calculate the real dpi.

Huh? I sit at a different distance from my monitor than my phone is from my face. I buy high resolution monitors, not because I want the "OMG the circle is a smoother circle" sense of a Retina display but because I want greater density. If we're nitpicking about "pt" in particular, fine. But if we're saying we should design UI elements and text specifically so that it's always the same size, count me completely out.