A twip (abbreviating "twentieth of a point", "twentieth of an inch point", or "twentieth of an Imperial point" ) is a
typographical
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and ...
measurement, defined as of a
typographical point. One twip is inch, or 17.64 μm.
In computing
Twips are screen-independent units to ensure that the proportion of screen elements are the same on all display systems. A twip is defined as being of an inch (approximately 0.01764 mm).
A
pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device.
In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...
is a screen-dependent unit, standing for 'picture element'. A pixel is a dot that represents the smallest graphical measurement on a screen.
Twips are the default unit of measurement in
Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to:
* Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET
* Visual Basic (cl ...
(version 6 and earlier, prior to VB.NET). Converting between twips and screen pixels is achieved using the TwipsPerPixelX and TwipsPerPixelY properties or the ScaleX and ScaleY methods.
Twips can be used with
Symbian OS bitmap images for automatic scaling from bitmap pixels to device pixels. They are also used in
Rich Text Format
)
As an example, the following RTF code
would be rendered as follows:
This is some bold text.
Character encoding
A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. Th ...
from Microsoft for platform-independent exchange and they are the base length unit in
OpenOffice.org and its
fork LibreOffice.
Flash
Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Fictional aliases
* Flash (DC Comics character), several DC Comics superheroes with super speed:
** Flash (Barry Allen)
** Flash (Jay Garrick)
** Wally West, the first Kid ...
internally specifies most sizes in units it calls twips, but which are really of a logical pixel, which is of an actual twip.
[Flash logical pixels are the same as HTML logical pixels, of which there are 96 to an inch, rather than 72: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel]
See also
*
Himetric Himetric is a resolution-independent unit of length. Its role is similar to the twip, but it is one hundredth of a millimetre. It is mainly used in Object Linking and Embedding and derived technologies such as ActiveX, Active Template Library and V ...
References
*
* MSDN Library &mdash
com.ms.wfc.ui.CoordinateSystem.TWIP* Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing &mdash
twip* Foundation, ActionScript 3.0 Animation, Making Things Move! by Keith Peters (pbk)
Typography
Units of length
{{Typ-stub