typography

On an iPhone how do I calculate the size of a character in pixels for a given point size? Point sizes are defined as 1/72 of an inch . That is, a 72-point font is approximately 1 inch from the lowest descent to the highest ascent. So the maximum height of a glyph in a 72pt font is about 1 inch. Apple's iphone tech specs page claims that the iPhone currently has a resolution of 163 pixels per inch. So 72 points is 163 pixels, or about 2.2639 pixels per point. Just remember that every glyph varies in height and width, so this is a very rough estimate of size. Generally, the distance between

Is there any way to force a font to be monospaced using CSS? By this I mean, using a non-monospace font, can you force the browser to render each character at a fixed width? If this is for aligning digits in tables where some fonts (with traditional typography) render them by default with variable width (e.g. Segoe UI on Windows), you should look into CSS properties for: font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; (this disables the proportional-nums default value for the numeric-spacing variant supported at least by OpenType fonts, and possibly by other font formats supported by the text renderer of

Context Take a look at Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/ It's much better looking than any other word cloud generators I've seen Note: the source is not available - read the FAQ: http://www.wordle.net/faq#code My Questions Is there an algorithm available that does what Wordle does? If no, what are some alternatives that produces similar kinds of output? Why I'm asking just curious want to learn I'm the creator of Wordle. Here's how Wordle actually works: Count the words, throw away boring words, and sort by the count, descending. Keep the top N words for some N. Assign each word a font size