Points to Meters (pt to m)

1 point equals 0.0003527777778 meters (rounded).

1 point = 0.0003527777778 meters

How to convert points to meters

To convert points to meters, multiply the number of points by 0.0003527777778. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 2,834.645669 (rounded).

meters = points × 0.0003527777778

Example: 10 points = 0.003527777778 meters.

About these units

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

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Related conversions

See all length units.