Twip

A twip (abbreviating "twentieth of a point", "twentieth of an inch point",[1] or "twentieth of an Imperial point" ) is a typographical measurement, defined as 1/20 of a typographical point. One twip is 1/1440 inch, or 17.64 μm.[2]

For the podcast, see This Week in Photography. For the austenitic steel, see TWIP steel.

In computing

Twips are screen-independent units to ensure that the proportion of screen elements are the same on all display systems. A twip is defined as being 1/1440 of an inch.

A pixel is a screen-dependent unit, standing for 'picture element'. A pixel is a dot that represents the smallest graphical measurement on a screen. Twips are the default unit of measurement in Visual Basic (version 6 and earlier, prior to VB.NET). Converting between twips and screen pixels is achieved using functions such as TwipsPerPixelX and TwipsPerPixelY.

Twips are a commonly used unit with Symbian OS bitmap images and are also used internally in SWF format. They are also used in Rich Text Format from Microsoft for platform-independent exchange and they are the base length unit in OpenOffice.org and its fork LibreOffice.

Flash internally calculates anything that uses pixels with twips (or 1/20 of a point). Sprites, movie clips and any other object on the stage are positioned with twips. As a result, the coordinates of (for example) sprites are always multiples of 0.05 (i.e. 1/20).

gollark: I would look it up, except I have no idea what search queries to try.
gollark: The thing I was looking at involved sticking somewhat general-purpose computers into the RAM chips, not just having dedicated analog computers for things.
gollark: I've heard about more general ways to achieve similar sorts of thing, like sticking HBM stuff onto GPUs and some computing-in-memory thing.
gollark: And brains are annoying to do things with since they're not understood very well and can't be copied/run in simulation very easily.
gollark: Running neural nets in analog hardware would also be kind of disadvantageous, since you couldn't then copy them very easily or run them on new stuff.

See also

References
  1. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing: http://foldoc.org/twip
  2. "Word 2007: Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification, version 1.9.1". Microsoft Corporation. 19 March 2008. p. 8. Retrieved 12 March 2017.


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