I am looking for a way to convert inches to points. I have not been able to find something to help guide me in the right direction on this conversion. I find a lot of stuff on conversions just not anything that deals with points measurement.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Charlie
According to this Wikipedia article, the factor for point to inch conversion is as follows:
1 pt ≡ 0.013837 in
And that seems to be right, because the article also mentions the factor for point to cm conversion, which I use in my AppleScripts.
Hope that helps.
According to all my time spent as a typesetter, 12 pt = 1 pica, and 6 pica = 1 inch, so 72 pt = 1 inch.
That is, following the postscript standards. The original pica/elite typefaces worked out to something like 71.9685763 points per inch after the paper dried. In 1770 Francois Didot proposed a solution to this problem by defining a point as exactly 1/72 of a French inch. Things weren’t as clear-cut in Britain and in the United States. Standardization in those countries didn’t come about until after the Chicago fire of 1871, which destroyed the foundry of Marder, Luse & Co. The foundry was forced to rebuild all of its molds from scratch, and commissioned Nelson Hawks to size their types. Hawks fixed the point at .013838 inch (basing his measurement on a popular pica type of the day).
Postscript comes along and it makes sense to standardize on a measurement that not only yields nice round numbers but also coincides with the original monitor resolution when expressed as dots per inch (72).
http://home.att.net/~tom.brodhead/points.htm
I remember going thru all this way back in the beginning with a Linotronic workflow moving to a Quark workflow, and being introduced to the picas and points measurement system (12 points per pica). 12p9 = twelve picas and nine points, which is exactly 2-1/8" on a line gauge.
Don’t even get me started on the wierdness of getting all that to work with metric or “decimal inches” systems. Way too much math just to eyeball how many lines of text can fit in a 3" high box (and a shop that doesn’t like to use decimals or computers).