Should I use pt or px?

Question

What is the difference between pt and px in CSS? Which one should I use and why?

Answer 1

Have a look at this excellent article at CSS-Tricks:

• px – em – % – pt – keyword

Taken from the article:

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pt

The final unit of measurement that it is possible to declare font sizes in is point values (pt). Point values are only for print CSS! A point is a unit of measurement used for real-life ink-on-paper typography. 72pts = one inch. One inch = one real-life inch like-on-a-ruler. Not an inch on a screen, which is totally arbitrary based on resolution.

Just like how pixels are dead-accurate on monitors for font-sizing, point sizes are dead-accurate on paper. For the best cross-browser and cross-platform results while printing pages, set up a print stylesheet and size all fonts with point sizes.

For good measure, the reason we don't use point sizes for screen display (other than it being absurd), is that the cross-browser results are drastically different:

px

If you need fine-grained control, sizing fonts in pixel values (px) is an excellent choice (it's my favorite). On a computer screen, it doesn't get any more accurate than a single pixel. With sizing fonts in pixels, you are literally telling browsers to render the letters exactly that number of pixels in height:

Windows, Mac, aliased, anti-aliased, cross-browsers, doesn't matter, a font set at 14px will be 14px tall. But that isn't to say there won't still be some variation. In a quick test below, the results were slightly more consistent than with keywords but not identical:

Due to the nature of pixel values, they do not cascade. If a parent element has an 18px pixel size and the child is 16px, the child will be 16px. However, font-sizing settings can be using in combination. For example, if the parent was set to 16px and the child was set to larger, the child would indeed come out larger than the parent. A quick test showed me this:

"Larger" bumped the 16px of the parent into 20px, a 25% increase.

Pixels have gotten a bad wrap in the past for accessibility and usability concerns. In IE 6 and below, font-sizes set in pixels cannot be resized by the user. That means that us hip young healthy designers can set type in 12px and read it on the screen just fine, but when folks a little longer in the tooth go to bump up the size so they can read it, they are unable to. This is really IE 6's fault, not ours, but we gots what we gots and we have to deal with it.

Setting font-size in pixels is the most accurate (and I find the most satisfying) method, but do take into consideration the number of visitors still using IE 6 on your site and their accessibility needs. We are right on the bleeding edge of not needing to care about this anymore.

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