Twip

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

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 (approximately 17.64 μm).

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 the TwipsPerPixelX and TwipsPerPixelY properties^[3] or the ScaleX and ScaleY methods.^[4]

Twips can be used with Symbian OS bitmap images for automatic scaling from bitmap pixels to device pixels.^[5] 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 specifies most sizes in units it calls twips, but which are really 1⁄20 of a logical pixel,^[6] which is 3⁄4 of an actual twip.^[7]

• Himetric

• Sparke, Gerard; Etherington, Stephen (2000). Visual Basic Programmers' Workbook. Pearson Education Australia. ISBN 978-1-74009-445-0.
• MSDN Library — com.ms.wfc.ui.CoordinateSystem.TWIP
• Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing — twip
• Foundation, ActionScript 3.0 Animation, Making Things Move! by Keith Peters ISBN 978-1-59059-791-0 (pbk)
• Converting between twips and pixels - Ruby code

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