Help talk:Illustrator

Font size unit

@KDS4444: Excuse me. Although I never use AI, I expect a sound explanation of converting px to em unit for font-size. I always use px when hand-coding my SVG so that instruction is baffling to me. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 13:12, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Got your message. I wish I truly understood the requirement myself. When I compose an image in Illustrator and use the px function to produce text of a desired font, I consistently get an undesired outcome. When I use the em function, the fonts turn out perfectly. I was unable to find an explanation of "em" as a font size technique within Illustrator as Illustrator does not use this function for its fonts. It is clearly an SVG code, and I am not more than passingly familiar with SVG. Have you never used "em" as a font size before? I have had nothing but problems with px, problems that disappeared when I finally started using em. KDS4444 (talk) 04:57, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

My issue is that em doesn't give consistent result because it's a relative unit like percentage which relies on "base font size" to work properly. To add insult to injury, the "base font size" differs between typefaces: For instance, Arimo is 16px but Liberation Sans is 12px. (Visually the 2 fonts look identical but Arimo glyphs have fewer points so the PDF rendered from it is slightly smaller.) -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk · contri.) 07:30, 22 August 2015 (UTC)