TABs (was: Waffling between Python and Ruby)

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

Someone (maybe Mikael Olofsson <mikael at isy.liu.se> - the attributions are a
bit tangled) wrote:
> Erm, isn't a pt as in 10 pt font the typographic unit 1/72 inch?

Well, that depends. Searching for "point size" in google led to one
explanation of the problem, at
http://www.vakcer.com/oberon/dtp/fonts/point.htm, which seems quite a good
description. I don't have my TeX book to hand (it's at home), but I'm fairly
sure it has another (similar) explanation therein.

(BTW, I 'love' (for some obscure sense of 'love') the typical confusion part
way down that page, where it says "As you can see, a point used in America
is smaller than that used in Europe", having already said that the points
used in UK and USA are the same...
...the page is presumably written by a USA citizen (either that or a
Euro-sceptic Brit who also confuses USA with America...))

Michael Hudson wrote:
> Well, sort of; the thing is the software doesn't know how big your
> monitor is physically, so can't work out what's it's own dpi is.
> You'd think a task as simple as "draw something this size" would be
> pretty simple after fifty years of computing, but you'd be wrong...
>
> (who's spent longer wrestling with this than he'd have liked to)

Ah, memories of *measuring* the size of early raster displays with a ruler
so we could set the pixel size correctly in our software (more years ago
than I want to remember, but the suppliers of the time thought 512 by 512
displays were good, whilst we (trying to display maps on the damn things)
knew they weren't...) (lest you think we were totally daft, they also didn't
actually SAY anywhere what their pixel size was, and we wanted the maps to
draw at something approaching the right scale!)

Tibs
--
Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.demon.co.uk/
Give a pedant an inch and they'll take 25.4mm
(once they've established you're talking a post-1959 inch, of course)
My views! Mine! Mine! (Unless Laser-Scan ask nicely to borrow them.)