Comments on: Typetester’s base font size

By: Nick Sherman

Nick Sherman — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 23:16:59 +0000

Being a traditional letterpress typographer, as well as a digital one, I think I might understand the em unit differently than many web designers.

I specify font size not in relative ems, but in the absolute unit of points (or pixels in the digital realm). Once the font size is set, that is when the em unit comes in?for specifying leading, letterspacing, paragraph margins, etc? In other words, the font size is at the top level of typographic hierarchy?set in absolute units?and it is not relative to a paramount ?base-size?.

I understand the idea behind the base-size concept, but I don’t see it being too useful, since I can never imagine a situation where I would want to increase or decrease every element on the page all at once.

I think the benefit to the em unit, especially in the digital realm, is in being able to change the font size for, say, different styles of paragraphs which exist on the same page while retaining their proportionally relative leading, paragraph indents, letter-spacing, etc. With the use of a base-size system, if you want to increase a paragraph’s font size, you then also have to alter these things one by one to retain the same proportions.

Maybe I don’t understand the benefit of the base-size concept fully vs the traditional use of the em unit, in which case I am curious to hear more.

By: Harry

Harry — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:53:10 +0000

Great, great, great tool. Thank you (!)

By: marko

marko — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:13:49 +0000

“I recently read Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm. He advises using a base value of small and use percentages to adjust. Claiming a more bulletproof design.”

You see, that is the trouble with web standards. People blindly follow what some guru writes in his book. Dan’s method is bulletproof, but it’s certainly no the only way. Most of the time I don’t use pixels (even though in TT I did set it in pixels), but when I write font-size: 62.5%, I actually mean font-size: 10px;.

By: CraZy_DeveLopeR

CraZy_DeveLopeR — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 17:43:44 +0000

Very useful tool.
Thank you!

By: Chris Pritchard

Chris Pritchard — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:56:43 +0000

Nice, tool. However, I am sort of curious as to why you believe a base value of pixels should be set and em value to adjust.

I recently read Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm. He advises using a base value of small and use percentages to adjust. Claiming a more bulletproof design.

What’s your take on his approach

By: dvessel

dvessel — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 00:13:55 +0000

Wow! This is great! It’s nice seeing how it renders with my own fonts in MacOSX but it would be even better if you had screen captures or emulate some how so we could preview what it’d look like in Windows.

Amazing tool anyways and the presentation is beautiful. Thanks for creating it.

By: shaggy

shaggy — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:59:03 +0000

cool!

Would it be possible to do a typster light?
i’m not sure what could go but it would be nice to have it fit all on one screen.

very nice!

By: isay

isay — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 02:07:14 +0000

Really nice trick.

By: Toby

Toby — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 23:46:06 +0000

I. Love. This. Tool.

What did I do before I found your site?!?

Thank you so much!

By: Rodrigo Amorim

Rodrigo Amorim — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 16:22:28 +0000

I must congratulate you on the excellent tool that Typesetter is. Excellent work!
The issue of default text size is a tricky one, especially with IE getting it so different from everyone else. Also, what about that issue of the W3C declaring pixels as a “relative measurement”? (see Jeffrey Zeldman’s “The average lenght of a web user’s arm” article in his 2003 book). Do you think the 62.5% would get us safely around that issue?

By: dusoft

dusoft — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:10:53 +0000

Interesting – I haven’t read anything about 62,5% before or 16px default.

I don’t use pixels anymore. Mostly I choose em as a base, but then Exploder has different counting, so mostly absolute keywords do it for me – small, medium, large…