Feet to Points (ft to pt)

1 foot equals 864 points exactly.

1 foot = 864 points

How to convert feet to points

To convert feet to points, multiply the number of feet by 864. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply points by 0.001157407407 (rounded).

points = feet × 864

Example: 10 feet = 8,640 points.

About these units

Foot (ft)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

12 inches. Defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. Still the standard unit for height, altitude in aviation and room dimensions in the US and UK.

Human anatomy supplied the idea: an adult foot is roughly 15 percent of body height. Ancient cultures turned that into standards, but not the same one. The Greek pous was about 302 mm, the standard Roman pes about 295.7 mm, and a Harappan foot of about 335 mm has been reported from the Indus Valley. Historically, a foot fell somewhere between about 250 and 335 mm. Charlemagne tried to standardize units around 790 with little lasting success, and in 1593 English law fixed the statute mile at 5,280 feet.

The modern foot dates from the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and so the foot as exactly 0.3048 meter; the UK adopted it on 1 January 1964. The US survey foot, defined in 1893 as 1200/3937 meter, was deprecated on 31 December 2022. Feet remain in everyday use for height and rooms in the US, and ISO shipping containers are defined in them. Aviation altitudes use them too: flight level 330 means 33,000 feet.

1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Foot (unit); Wikipedia: Mile; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Point (pt)

Typography & screenCurrent unit

1/72 of an inch (0.3528 mm). The desktop-publishing point used by PostScript and CSS.

Printers have used a point since at least 1517, when Francesco Torniello da Novara in Milan set it at one ninth of a letter's height. Later systems differed: Fournier in 1737 used about 0.345 mm, Didot in 1783 about 0.376 mm, and the American point approved by type founders in 1886 about 0.3515 mm. TeX uses 1/72.27 inch, or 0.35146 mm, and a metric point of 0.250 mm was set by standards bodies in 1999.

The figure used here is the desktop publishing point of exactly 1/72 inch, 0.3528 mm. Xerox Interpress used it, and Adobe PostScript carried it on. W3C adopted it in 1996 for CSS, where 12 pt equals 16 px because a pixel is assumed to be 1/96 inch. NIST lists the computer point as an exact conversion. This point is about 0.4 percent longer than the TeX point. Font sizes refer to the em square rather than the printed letters.

1 point = 0.0003527777778 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Point (typography); NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8

Related conversions

See all length units.