Sixteen pixels make twelve points, because one pixel equals 0.75 point. Type a value in pixels and the result appears in the field beside it. The converter earns its keep when a mockup was built in pixels and the file has to reach print, a PDF or a signature in an email client.
One pixel equals 0.75 point, because the CSS standard settles an inch at 96 pixels and 72 points [1]. Out of that comes the pair that turns up in every project: 16 px is exactly 12 pt, and 24 px is 18 pt.
You convert in this direction when the work began on a screen and ends up in the world of print. Page-layout programs, email clients, spreadsheets and the PDF format all measure text and pages in points, so a mockup written in pixels needs restating in their unit.
The converter suits anyone sending screen work to a printer, developers reading page dimensions out of a PDF, and mobile interface designers, for whom the word point means something else entirely.
Below you will find a table of text sizes, a table of large values, the dimensions of nine page formats in PDF points and a comparison of points and pixels on Apple screens. The opposite direction lives on the points to pixels converter.
The formula is short: points = pixels × 72 ÷ 96, which is multiplying by 0.75. Twenty pixels gives 15 pt, 40 px gives 30 pt, and 96 px gives exactly 72 pt, that is one inch.
The answer comes out round whenever the pixel count divides by four: 12 px is 9 pt, 16 px is 12 pt, 20 px is 15 pt, 24 px is 18 pt. Everything else lands on quarter points — 15 px gives 11.25 pt and 18 px gives 13.5 pt. Page-layout programs take those fractions without complaint.
The 0.75 multiplier holds at the density of 96 pixels per inch, which the CSS standard assumes for the screen and for printing from a browser [1]. When you are preparing raster artwork at some other resolution, work out the physical size with the px to mm converter with adjustable DPI. The point stays tied to that density whatever the reader sets, while rem follows the browser text size: at a 16px base one pixel is 0.0625rem, which the px to rem converter works out.
The table covers 29 sizes from 8 to 96 pixels, the whole range you meet in interfaces and on web pages. The first column gives the value in points, the second the physical size at a density of 96 DPI. The bold rows are the sizes used most often: 16 px in body copy, 24 px as the WCAG large-text threshold and 96 px as exactly one inch.
| Size in pixels | Points | Millimetres |
|---|---|---|
| 8 px | 6 pt | 2.117 mm |
| 10 px | 7.5 pt | 2.646 mm |
| 11 px | 8.25 pt | 2.91 mm |
| 12 px | 9 pt | 3.175 mm |
| 13 px | 9.75 pt | 3.44 mm |
| 14 px | 10.5 pt | 3.704 mm |
| 15 px | 11.25 pt | 3.969 mm |
| 16 px | 12 pt | 4.233 mm |
| 17 px | 12.75 pt | 4.498 mm |
| 18 px | 13.5 pt | 4.763 mm |
| 19 px | 14.25 pt | 5.027 mm |
| 20 px | 15 pt | 5.292 mm |
| 21 px | 15.75 pt | 5.556 mm |
| 22 px | 16.5 pt | 5.821 mm |
| 24 px | 18 pt | 6.35 mm |
| Size in pixels | Points | Millimetres |
|---|---|---|
| 26 px | 19.5 pt | 6.879 mm |
| 28 px | 21 pt | 7.408 mm |
| 30 px | 22.5 pt | 7.938 mm |
| 32 px | 24 pt | 8.467 mm |
| 36 px | 27 pt | 9.525 mm |
| 40 px | 30 pt | 10.583 mm |
| 44 px | 33 pt | 11.642 mm |
| 48 px | 36 pt | 12.7 mm |
| 56 px | 42 pt | 14.817 mm |
| 64 px | 48 pt | 16.933 mm |
| 72 px | 54 pt | 19.05 mm |
| 80 px | 60 pt | 21.167 mm |
| 90 px | 67.5 pt | 23.812 mm |
| 96 px | 72 pt | 25.4 mm |
This table gathers the widths of windows, frames and whole screens, which come up for conversion along with the rest of a mockup. The 1,920 px row is the width of Full HD, 1,080 px is its height, and 512 px is the commonest app icon size. The millimetre column shows how wide each would print at 96 DPI.
| Value in pixels | Points | Millimetres (96 DPI) |
|---|---|---|
| 100 px | 75 pt | 26.5 mm |
| 150 px | 112.5 pt | 39.7 mm |
| 200 px | 150 pt | 52.9 mm |
| 240 px | 180 pt | 63.5 mm |
| 300 px | 225 pt | 79.4 mm |
| 320 px | 240 pt | 84.7 mm |
| 375 px | 281.25 pt | 99.2 mm |
| 400 px | 300 pt | 105.8 mm |
| 500 px | 375 pt | 132.3 mm |
| Value in pixels | Points | Millimetres (96 DPI) |
|---|---|---|
| 512 px | 384 pt | 135.5 mm |
| 600 px | 450 pt | 158.8 mm |
| 800 px | 600 pt | 211.7 mm |
| 1,024 px | 768 pt | 270.9 mm |
| 1,080 px | 810 pt | 285.8 mm |
| 1,200 px | 900 pt | 317.5 mm |
| 1,920 px | 1,440 pt | 508 mm |
| 2,000 px | 1,500 pt | 529.2 mm |
The PDF format places every element in user space, and the default unit of that space is 1/72 inch, which is precisely a typographic point. A UserUnit entry in the page description can change it, and where that entry is absent, 1/72 inch applies [2]. The origin sits in the bottom-left corner of the page and the vertical axis grows upward.
That is why a Letter sheet measures 612 × 792 pt in a PDF file, while A4 comes to 595 × 842 pt. You will see those numbers in document-generation libraries, in the logs of prepress tools, and in the page size field in Acrobat once you switch the unit to points.
If you are building an invoice or a report from code and hold the mockup dimensions in pixels, multiply by 0.75 and you have the page coordinates ready. A width of 800 px gives 600 pt, which is 12 pt narrower than the 612 pt of a Letter page and leaves room for a margin; the same 800 px would overrun A4 by five points.
The American formats start from inches, so they come out even: Letter is 8.5 × 11 inches, which is 612 × 792 pt exactly. The A series and the DL envelope start from millimetres, so their point dimensions are fractional and libraries round them to whole numbers.
| Format | Size in points | Size in millimetres |
|---|---|---|
| US Letter | 612 × 792 pt | 215.9 × 279.4 mm |
| US Legal | 612 × 1,008 pt | 215.9 × 355.6 mm |
| Tabloid | 792 × 1,224 pt | 279.4 × 431.8 mm |
| A3 | 842 × 1,191 pt | 297 × 420 mm |
| A4 | 595 × 842 pt | 210 × 297 mm |
| Format | Size in points | Size in millimetres |
|---|---|---|
| A5 | 420 × 595 pt | 148 × 210 mm |
| A6 | 298 × 420 pt | 105 × 148 mm |
| B5 (ISO) | 499 × 709 pt | 176 × 250 mm |
| DL envelope | 312 × 624 pt | 110 × 220 mm |
Apple calls the base layout unit in its systems a point, but it measures the screen rather than paper. The scale property describes it outright as the relationship between points, the logical coordinate space, and pixels, the device coordinate space [3]. A value of 1.0 means a point equals a pixel, 2.0 spreads it across two pixels, and 3.0 across three.
In practice a designer draws an iPhone on a grid 402 points wide while the display shows 1,206 pixels [4]. The iOS point therefore converts through the device scale factor, while the 0.75 multiplier on this page handles the typographic point.
Android solved the same problem under the name dp, the density-independent pixel. Its reference is a screen at 160 dpi, and the formula reads px = dp × (dpi ÷ 160). The documentation states it plainly and at the same time advises reaching for TypedValue.applyDimension() in code rather than hard-coding the sum [5]. Twelve points make a pica, so a result of 240 pt can also be given as 20 picas — the pixels to picas converter reports that unit directly.
The points column shows the grid an interface is designed on, the pixels column the actual number of light points on the display. The 375 pt in the first row is the width that iPhone app mockups rested on for years, and 834 pt is the width of an iPad in portrait orientation.
| Device | Points (design grid) | Pixels (display) | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone SE (3rd generation) | 375 × 667 pt | 750 × 1,334 px | 2× |
| iPhone 17 Pro | 402 × 874 pt | 1,206 × 2,622 px | 3× |
| iPhone 17 Pro Max | 440 × 956 pt | 1,320 × 2,868 px | 3× |
| iPad Pro 11-inch | 834 × 1,194 pt | 1,668 × 2,388 px | 2× |
24 px and it becomes 18 pt.Every figure in the tables was computed from the unit definitions and checked arithmetically before publication. Historical values and the names of local units come from the sources listed above.
Content last reviewed: · written and checked by the Arteon team
One pixel is 0.75 point at the standard density of 96 DPI. Four pixels make exactly three points, which is why every value divisible by four comes out round: 16 px is 12 pt, 20 px is 15 pt, and 24 px is 18 pt.
Points = pixels × 72 ÷ 96, which is multiplying by 0.75. Forty pixels gives 30 pt, and 64 px gives exactly 48 pt. The converter above applies the formula for you, and both fields accept input, so you can start from either side.
Sixteen pixels is 12 points. That pair anchors the whole of web typography: 16 px is the browser default text size and 12 pt is the usual size in an office document, so the text looks the same on screen and on paper.
Fifteen pixels gives 11.25 pt, and twenty pixels gives exactly 15 pt. Quarter points appear at every pixel count that leaves a remainder when divided by four, and page-layout programs take them without complaint.
One inch is 96 pixels and at the same time 72 points, as the CSS standard sets it. A hundred pixels therefore gives 75 pt, or 26.5 mm, overrunning the inch by four pixels. The figure of 100 pixels per inch does turn up as a resolution setting in design programs, where the number is yours to choose.
A Letter sheet measures 612 × 792 pt, because the PDF format measures a page in units of 1/72 inch, that is in typographic points. It comes out even: 8.5 × 11 inches with no rounding. A4 measures 595 × 842 pt.
A point in Apple systems describes the logical grid of the screen and converts to pixels through the device scale factor: 1×, 2× or 3×. A typographic point holds a fixed size of 1/72 inch and describes a physical dimension. One name therefore covers two measures, and the 0.75 multiplier applies to the second of them.
Both numbers talk about density, meaning how many dots fit on an inch of material, but they describe quite different levels of detail. Seventy-two dots per inch matches the old Macintosh screens, 96 is today’s CSS standard, and 300 is the usual resolution for offset printing. Converting px to pt rests on the fixed ratio of 72 to 96, so the answer stays the same whatever resolution you print at.
Put the stylesheet size into the converter and you get the font size for the document. Text at 16 px gives 12 pt, text at 18 px gives 13.5 pt, and a 32 px heading gives 24 pt. Those same numbers go into Word, into InDesign and into the size field in an email client.
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