horrizantal ruler measurement in pixels instead of mm,cm,inch

Hi,

I want to use Libre Office to write posts to my blogger blog. I write
the posts using Libre office and save them as html file and use a
simple desktop client i wrote to post to blogger.

My Blog post body width is 570 pixels wide. I want to set the
horizontal ruler in my LibreOffice to pixels instead of cm,mm and
inches in such a way that it looks similar to my blog post's body.

'pixels' is not a defined way to measure something, because you will not
know how many pixels you have on an inch (or cm)

DPI is, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch)

But the blog or webpage's width or height is measured in pixels.

Hello, Arun,

I think you'll find that using 72 pixels per inch (or the equivalent in metric) will get you close to what you want. A pixel or dot is relative and in printing the dpi (dots per inch) are specified for halftones in a given publication.

Plus, when viewed in a web browser, you never know how the user has "text size" set, so there are really no guarantees how the page will look to any given user. The user needs that adjustment to walk the tightrope between their visual acuity and a useful amount of information on the screen and their physical screen size. I have become acutely aware of this (a) as I age and (b) since a friend of mine had an accident that affected their vision.

Cheers,

Richard

yes,but my blog's post-body width always remains same because the
template is designed like that. What i'm trying to tell you is that i
want to set the ruler to be in the same measurement of pixels. Almost
every webpage or blog template has pixels as units. Unfortunately we
dont have pixels scale in Libre Offfice .

I think we should have the pixel scale because we have an option of
HTML document in the File>New>.

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.

Hi :slight_smile:

Being bad-practice does not stop things from wide-scale adoption. If we want to
marginalise ourselves and become increasingly irrelevant then making a stand
about this and other issues makes sense. If, on the other hand, we want to be
wisely used in the mainstream then we will have to adopt many appalling
prospects such as ".docx" formats. Best-practice is something we aim for when
we can but it's not always practical.

In this case of DPI & pixels as measurements i think we have to accept the
measurement as defined by MicroSoft rather than the slightly more sensible Mac
definitions.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hello, Arun,

I feel your pain on this. It raises a large philosophical issue which I have outlined in another post and, thankfully, I don't have to solve it, but I know what my response would be in a customer/client-centric situation--the same as Adobe's.

However, this begs the issue in my mind of the universality of the Web and the ability of the end-user to customize the page to their liking. As I said in a previous post, as I age and especially working as a computer "geek" for someone who has had their vision impaired by a horse-riding accident, I hope that the web page templates are not forcing a specific text size for the content.

In FireFox, I can zoom in and out using <ctrl> + or <ctrl> - keys on the numeric keypad. In the View>Zoom submenu, I can select an option so that the zoom only applies to text. When that option is off (default), both the text and the images zoom together. There is also a plug-in that I have and use for FF that allows zooming of images alone (not surprisingly, it's called ImageZoom <smile>). In

Furthermore, pages rarely look the same in FireFox and Internet Explorer and if one forces a specific pixel size to attempt to make the page look the same and it locks out the zoom capability, then, I fear, those whose vision is not as good as yours will be frustrated with the experience.

Cheers,

Richard

Hi, Tom,

As Adobe appears to do, can you provide an option as it may confuse the user of one system if they are forced in to the measurement of the other?

I really like TDF's approach to this.

Cheers,

Richard

Hi :slight_smile:

I have no idea how difficult it would be for devs to provide even 1 solution to
this let alone 3 or possibly 2 if Mac's way is the same as Linux. I think BSD
and others are likely to use the same/similar logic as Linux. Mac was a BSD so
who knows how this has all 'panned-out'.

I think Linux users and Mac people are used to dealing with MicroSoft ways so
getting this done the Windows way would seem the best approach to start with.
Anyway the decision is really up to the devs to decide if they have time to
work on something like this when they have so much else going on already.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Perhaps this will do as a workaround:

570 pixels is 35.758594108 pica according to:
<http://www.unitconversion.org/typography/pixels-x-to-picas-printer-s-conversion.html>

Note that, right-click your horizontal ruler & set to pica. Then set
your margins etc accordingly.

You can experiment with:
http://www.unitconversion.org/unit_converter/typography.html
and perhaps even use inches if you wish (570px=~5.9375in).

Brilliant! A good work-around!