Twip

This article is about the screen-independent measurement unit. For other uses, see TWIP steel.

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]

twip
Unit system	Typographic units
Unit of	Length
Conversions
1 twip in ...	... is equal to ...
Typographic units	⁠1/20⁠ points
Imperial/US units	⁠1/1440⁠ in
Metric (SI) units	17.64 μm

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 (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]

See also

• Himetric

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.
3. "TwipsPerPixelX, TwipsPerPixelY Properties". docs.microsoft.com. 23 August 2006.
4. "ScaleX, ScaleY Methods". docs.microsoft.com. 23 August 2006.
5. Dueder, Janelle (December 20, 2020). "Blitting and bitmaps - Symbian OS C++". 25 Years of Programming.
6. "SWF FILE FORMAT SPECIFICATION" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-11-20.
7. Flash logical pixels are the same as HTML logical pixels, of which there are 96 to an inch, rather than 72

• 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