Twip


A twip is a typographical measurement, defined as 1/20 of a typographical point. One twip is 1/1440 inch, or 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.
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. 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. Sprites, movie clips and any other object on the stage are positioned with twips. As a result, the coordinates of sprites are always multiples of 0.05.