Yes, there's a lot of messiness in how fonts work. Doing cross-platform desktop GUI development, I feel that pain firsthand (and not just for fonts, but for all kinds of rendered constructs...controls, lines/curves/polys, bitmaps, windows). But working with pixels is no solution. On macOS, Retina pixels are 1/2 the dimensions of non-Retina pixels (in principle, on Apple hardware...actual dot pitches will vary). "Standard" vs. 2k vs. 4k vs. 8k monitors (not to mention all the things in between). And multiple monitors on the same system might not agree with one another. This is especially common with laptops, where there's really no particular correlation between the laptop's built-in display and the external monitor the user happens to have available.I can't understand why anybody would consider pixel measurements a viable solution at all. My best attempt to understand what the blog author is wanting to achieve is maybe he wants to fine-tune appearances on his system in a way that doesn't need to be portable. He talks about customizing editor appearances, and I suppose that editors generally don't have the problem of having to do something sensible across multiple systems. But even there, at least some people are still going to have the disagreeing-multiple-monitors problem.
justsomehnguy|2 years ago
Because the author falls for the old 'works for me - works for everyone'.