Font size in pixels doesn't seem to work properly (fixed - had small caps and all caps enabled)

[KarinvdB]

Hi,

I've bought AD for Mac recently, I've worked in AD on iPad for a while for illustration but I'm now trying web design in AD desktop.

I've been running a trail of Sketch as well since my company uses that. I'm now trying to reproduce a design of an existing website that I already created in Sketch in AD.

I'm having a bit of a problem with the font size. In Sketch it is set to be pixels, so when I noticed in AD it is pt, I googled and did find the setting to uncheck in preferences to show fonts in pt.

The thing is, it has no effect on the size. In 30pt it was too small, but now it is showing 30px but it's still the same size. The height of the element shows as 13,8px instead of 30px.

Am I missing something? I would assume that if I set the font size to 30px the characters should be 30px high. I'm using the same font and specifications in Sketch and the result there is correct.

 

Edited December 2, 2019 by KarinvdB

[KarinvdB]

Oops, I seem to have found the problem. I had both All caps and Small caps enabled which made the whole text appear in small caps which are of course smaller than regular caps. I'll leave this here in case someone has the same problem....

[Joachim_L]

Depending on the font, 30px font size varies if you measure the height of the box.

Here some further reading (first link English, second German):

https://www.creativelive.com/blog/why-do-font-sizes-vary/

https://www.diedruckerei.de/magazin/schriftgroessen-crashkurs/

[KarinvdB]

Thanks @Joachim_L for the information!

I did notice that there are some inconsistencies between the two programs in how they measure element sizes. Text elements in Sketch have the height equal to the line height, no matter the character height of the text in question, in Affinity the height of the element is equal to the height of the characters. This is visible in the bounding boxes of the selections in the screenshots above. 

However with embedded SVG's it's the other way around! If the SVG has some whitespace, Affinity respects that and shows the size including white space, whereas in Sketch the size is that of the curves resulting from rendering the SVG, so no whitespace. Bit confusing sometimes but I've managed to replicate my design pretty well in AD now.