Fonts - sp to pt

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
June 27, 2018
4 replies
4762 views

Hi all,

I am working on inDesign and Xd.

I have guidlines from a client, in which the fonts are sized at sp. How will I be able to figure out the conversion to pt?
I cannot change the units from preferences.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Bill Silbert

I also had never heard of the sp designation for type so I did a Google search and came up with the following relevant date:

You can see in the first highlighted area that the sp unit is not a fixed measure but rather determined by the users preferences and the architecture of the user's viewing screen. You can see by the lower two highlighted areas the number of points to a physical inch compared to the approximate (and varying) number of sp units to the same physical inch. I would imagine if you wanted to do a rough conversion that you could divide 72 by 160 and use that fraction (.45) when converting sp to points. So using this math your 29 sp text would convert to 13.05 points. Remember this is not presented as accurate given the ambiguity of the sp unit.

Bill Silbert

Correct answer

Community Expert

I also had never heard of the sp designation for type so I did a Google search and came up with the following relevant date:

You can see in the first highlighted area that the sp unit is not a fixed measure but rather determined by the users preferences and the architecture of the user's viewing screen. You can see by the lower two highlighted areas the number of points to a physical inch compared to the approximate (and varying) number of sp units to the same physical inch. I would imagine if you wanted to do a rough conversion that you could divide 72 by 160 and use that fraction (.45) when converting sp to points. So using this math your 29 sp text would convert to 13.05 points. Remember this is not presented as accurate given the ambiguity of the sp unit.