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.