Designer, developer, illustrator, aspiring singer, D&D aficionado.

Blurry Stuff — An Em Problem

#Tech #CSS

The confusion over nesting elements set in em has been over for a couple years now, so what else is there to worry about this magnificent unit we all learned to love?

Screenshot of zoomed in red text with poor antialiasing that reads “half pixels”

Today I faced this problem while switching from SVG images to an icon font in an upcoming layout revision for Clicksign.

First, I thought it could be something related to the font or box size, but had no success in figuring it out until I started commenting out the CSS of elements surrounding the icon. I noticed that padding and margin had something to do with it.

Tools

This little forgotten feature in Chrome’s Developer Tools helped me confirm my suspicions:

Screenshot of the layout inspector in Google Chrome

It turned out that 1.8em was generating a 7.920px padding that nudged the icon to a half pixel. Olá Brother’s amazing Sip app also helped me with its quick zoom feature.

Screenshot of Sip’s zoom tool focusing on a badly antialiased icon

Wrapping up

Be extra careful using em units when you have pixel-perfect demanding assets like icon fonts and other small glyphs. You can either fall back to px or fine-tune your em numbers to achieve round values.