After thinking about it a little more and playing with Inkscape I think I know what is happening.
Two observations:
(1) What Inkscape calls "Font size" is the line height at 100%. (2) What Inkscape calls "Spacing between lines" is the line height wrt. font size.
Both of those are wrong. To see what I mean have a look at the attached image.
In the attached image the text is set to be 72 pt big, which equals 1 inch. With the "line spacing" at 1 (100%) the lines are exactly 1 inch apart (red lines). When the "line spacing" is set to 0 the thing on the right can be seen. That clearly shows that it's not the line spacing but the line height that is set by that setting. When the space is 0 the two lines should almost touch but not overlap. As I wrote in my last mail, Inkscape gives a value of 6.72 mm in the control bar. That seems to be the actual line spacing, at least it's what I can see as non-occupied space between the text lines (green lines).
Can anyone confirm that Inkscape makes text too small (1) and uses a mislabeled (and in practice rather useless) line spacing setting (2)? At least the latter seems obvious to me.
I hope we can sort this out to make Inkscape suitable for serious typographic work. Or, what is also possible, educate me about where I am wrong.
Thanks for your time Tobias
Am Donnerstag, 18. Februar 2016, 15:27:14 schrieb Tobias Ellinghaus:
Hi,
in IRC there was a discussion about the font size setting and I have to admit that I don't understand it.
The tooltip says the value is in pt, which (according to the CSS specs) is 1/72th of an inch.
Inkscape now uses a DPI of 96 to convert to/from pixels.
When I type some text in 72 pt and then select the object the control bar tells me it's size was 6.72 mm, which would be 0.264566929134 inch [0] and that is 25.4 pixel [1], which is what I can see in the XML being stored.
The part I don't understand is how that value relates to the initial 72 pt? And is it a coincidence that the final result of 25.4 is the conversion factor inch/mm?
Some clarification or links to documentation would be appreciated.
Tobias
PS: Would it be possible to fix the font size box to show "nice" values and not some rounded numbers? Maybe just storing the pt value typed by the user along the converted px value and showing that? Or doing it the right way and putting the pt verbatim into the SVG as it used to be done? Currently it's really hard to do any serious work that involves text.
[0] 6.72 / 25.4 = 0.264566929134 [1] 0.264566929134 * 96 = 25,3984251969 ~ 25.4
