Quote:
Originally Posted by ProDigit
Actually, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I've always learned that fontsize expressed in .pt came from points or pixels.
This would depend on the resolution of the screen.
Wikipedia states that: "Today, the traditional point has been supplanted by the desktop publishing point (also called the PostScript point), which has been rounded to an even 72 points to the inch".
I may be totally wrong, but I think this could be true on 144DPI screens.
However the higher the DPI reaches on a screen the harder it is to read, and the smaller the letters become on screen.
(eg: the 5" 800x600 screen reader has a higher DPI (220ppi)than an 6" screen with the same resolution(166DPI). On the 5" the fonts will be considerably smaller, though not less clear, since they both have the same resolution (eg: pt 12 has 12 pixels in height on both the 5" and on the 6" screen))
CRT monitors had greater issues here, since you could literally have a dpi of over 250(by having extreme high resolutions in the likes of 2560x2048 or something absurd, on a 21" screen); but LCD screens are pretty consistant @ around 150dpi, partly because of the marketing. Laptops generally come in 14 or 15" screens 1280x800 for widescreen, 15-16 have 13?? x ??? - 17" => 1600 x 1024 resolution...etc...
Though Fujitsu recently released a high grade LCD of 1280x800 screen in a 5" display on the u2010, one of their mini laptops!, (=costly)
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Points at 72 per inch is much older than pixels or computers. 12 point is the standard typewriter font (Pica) and 6 lines per inch and 10 characters per inch. The points system was originally developed for printers and typesetters.
A 5" screen at 600x800 is rectangular, not square and has 200 ppi which is easy to compute using the Pythagorean theorem.
Computer screens typically have a way to adjust the ppi to correspond to points per inch. On windows you can right click on the screen and bring up properties. Then select settings and advanced to reach the number. It is usually close. Use google to search for a pixel ruler or cool ruler to download a ruler you can use.