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About emdpi.com
This site is about the meaning of the em, screen dpi, image dpi, pixels per inch, and the relationship between logical and physical inches in Windows. There are many forums, web sites, and books about web page design and graphics that ‘explain’ the meaning of these terms, which would be great except for the fact that most of them get it wrong! Look at that common definition of the em square. A few moments thought would make one realize that there are a lot of fonts that don’t contain the ‘capital letter M’. Would that make the definition ‘An em square is usually a square the size of a capital letter M, except when it isn’t’? Also note the weasel word “usually”.
Misunderstandings arise because there is no universally accepted definitions of the words we use. Ask what is meant by resolution and you will find that same word used to describe quite different things. This quote from a popular web design book illustrates this point as it claims there are “two quite distinct (resolution) concepts”. I can think of five. Some of the things I say in these pages you can easily check for yourself. I hope the explanations here will shed some light. I’m only dealing here with Windows. |
“ An em square is usually a square the size of a capital letter M ”| © 2006 Richard Mason |