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I set the pixel size to 8×8, but the resulting glyphs are larger (or smaller) than that. Why?

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I set the pixel size to 8×8, but the resulting glyphs are larger (or smaller) than that. Why?

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A lot of people have difficulties to understand this topic, because they think of glyphs as fixed-width resp. fixed-height “cells”, like those of fonts used in terminals/consoles. This assumption is simply not valid with most “modern” font formats, even bitmapped-based ones like PCF or BDF. Be aware that the character size that is set either through FT_Set_Char_Size() or FT_Set_Pixel_Sizes() isn’t directly related to the dimension of the glyph bitmaps generated. Rather, the character size is indeed the size of an abstract square, called the EM, used by typographers to design fonts. Scaling two distinct fonts to the same character size, be it expressed in points or pixels, will generally result in bitmaps with distinct dimensions! Note that historically, the EM corresponded to the width of a capital “M” in Latin typefaces. However, later improvements in typography led to designs that greatly detract from this rule. Today, it is not possible to connect the EM size to a specific font “fea

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