Re: [libreoffice-users] horrizantal ruler measurement in pixels...philosophy

On 2011-01-27 8:05 AM, Cley Faye wrote:
> The thing is, good design practice tend to avoid doing things with pixel as
> the measurement units, for the reason explained in this thread.
> For example, if your display is set to a specific DPI, having a pixel
> settings in libreoffice would allow you to set the text exactly like you
> want... but if someone browsing your website have another settings, your
> text will be all off for this user.
> For those reason i don't think it make much sense to add a "pixel" unit in
> LibreOffice, as it will be dependant of a given DPI setting anyway. For your
> issue, you might want to either translate your "pixel" settings in cm (or
> anything) while editing the document, or properly design your site to use
> those unit instead of fixed pixel settings...
Hello, Cley,

I was thinking about this and, indeed, Photoshop has pixels available 
and has two different option settings:
  For rulers, they offer: pixels, inches, cm, mm, points, picas, percent
  For type, they offer: pixels, points, mm

Then there is an option for Point/Pica size of either
    - PostScript (72 points/inch
    - Traditional (72.27 points/inch)

This is from version CS, which is what I have handy here (I do have CS5 
on my photo computer, but it's not booted at the moment.

I am of mixed mind about offering options (and I'm not doing the coding, 
so the labour to do it isn't an issue with me <smile>).
 - (1) The available options should make sense and enforce good design 
practice
 - (2) This is a tool and the user knows what they want/need and the 
software should make an effort to accommodate user's wishes

(1), I fear, is a very rigorous approach and people generally don't like 
to be told how to work--they don't like modifying their behaviour to the 
tool.
(2) is certainly a customer-centric approach but the downside is that it 
makes the code more complex and contributes to a major criticism of the 
market-leader office suite: that it is bloatware.

While I agree with your reply, Cley, (it seems as if you are agreeing 
with my reply), I'm wondering philosophically how TDF wishes to approach 
the question. I think, if it doesn't cost much effort, adding it as an 
option at least has precedent and it might make Arun's life easier. I 
don't think it hurts anything and the documentation could explain the 
conversion factor of how the pixel count is arrived at. Not knowing the 
internals of LO/OOo, I wonder if this isn't just at a user interface 
level anyway. I think MSO uses 1/1440 of an inch as the internal 
increment, but that goes back 20 years to a little study I did on the 
Word format as I was investigating writing my own printer drivers for 
Word 5 for DOS.

An interesting aside, I think LO is more consistent between the 
spreadsheet application and the word processing application in measuring 
widths than MSO. If I recall, width changes in Excel when the font size 
(or the default font size) changes!

Cheers,

Richard

I believe that PhotoShop deserves its market share and it is one of a 
handful of programs I'm not looking for a freeware alternative for. It 
is interesting to note that they offer this option. I also THINK they 
offer it in InDesign as well.

--
Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@richardhess.com
Aurora, Ontario, Canada           http://www.richardhess.com/
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.


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