Adobe text and bitmap sizes

[Charles Moir]

To quote Aeneas from another thread:

For bitmap work, I use Photoshop 7. As I often have to work on websites and have too much experience with Photoshop's poor font anti aliasing, I thought I'd import the bitmap I created in Xara and use Xara's font handling as it's really much better. To my surprise, my 760 pixels wide bitmap didn't fit on my 760pix wide document. I found out that this is probably caused by my importing of a 72pix/inch bitmap that xara displays too big as it takes 96pixels/inch. So how can I either have Xara not look at the inches but at the pixels, or how can I change that 96 into 72?

The 96 / 72 dpi issue is a bug in all Adobe applications, and a serious one at that. Adobe have decided to ignore the actual Windows screen resolution settings (96dpi) and try to get away with pretending it's really 72dpi instead (the very old, and very outdated Mac standard) The result is chaos and incompatibility with all Windows software. (Evidence; all font sizes in Adobe application are wrong compared to the same font in Windows such as Office (and Xara of course). Or just draw an object 1 inch long and see how it compares with the same 1in in say Microsoft Office. Or view the same bitmap in Photoshop and Windows Picture Viewer @ 100%. They are both completely different sizes. Adobe gets it wrong. Xara gets it right. On Windows 1in should be 96 pixels. Adobe thinks it should be 72 pixels.

When importing bitmaps Xara looks at the dpi of the bitmap and scales the image to the correct dpi. We now realise this is probably the wrong thing to do (although technically the right thing to do) because it means bitmaps exported form Photoshop or the Mac come in at the wrong size (well wrong compared to Photoshop). So in future we're looking to ignore the dpi settings of bitmaps and always scale 1:1 pixels on import.

The easy way to solve the bitmap size is this: If you know the actual pixel size of the bitmap, when you've imported it, just enter the pixel width into the Infobar, and the bitmap will be scaled to the correct pixel size and the same as in Photoshop. Or alternatively scale the bitmap to 75% (just as easy, just enter 75% into the scale field on the Infobar). Now the Xara pixel measurement, and screen size will match that in Photoshop.

Compare the same font written in 4 different applications. Note the metrics exactly match in Xara and Microsoft Word (Microsoft Cleartype anti-aliasing is really excellent, as you can see)