[Pro] Confused About REM and EM? by Jeremy Church

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1

http://j.eremy.net/confused-about-rem-and-em/

Another nice article attempting to de-mystify relative type measurements. (PX are so last century.)

The author is one of those who’ve made helpful little tools like this - http://type-scale.com

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Thanks for the share Ernie!

REMs and EMs are incredibly powerful, once you understand how they work. Unlike Jeremy, I’ll typically declare the font-size using REMs, with a pixel fallback for IE, to avoid the confusion that inheritance can cause with EMs. Then, I use EMs for things like padding and margins to keep it relative to the font-size.

However, there is a lot of overlap. I’ll use EM’s for font-size when I know that I always want a certain element to have a smaller font-size than what’s surrounding it. For example, the <code> elements on CalebGrove.com are set to 0.8em because I want them to alway have a slightly smaller font-size than the surrounding text.

In the same way, I’ll use REMs for margins, padding, and the like when I need to have something more “fixed”.

The power is in knowing which to use.

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Thanks for sharing, very useful info, and very well explained here.
Now I also dicovered this tool by the same author!

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…although it’s sometimes very awkward to spot where an (ems sized) font is re-sizing unexpectedly in the CSS cascade

–

David Owen

On 7 Mar 2014, at 17:18, “Caleb Grove” email@hidden wrote:

However, there is a lot of overlap. I’ll use EM’s for font-size when I know that I always want a certain element to have a smaller font-size than what’s surrounding it. For example, the <code> elements on CalebGrove.com are set to 0.8em because I want them to alway have a slightly smaller font-size than the surrounding text.

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