Twips to Millimeters (twip to mm)

1 twip equals 0.01763888889 millimeters (rounded).

1 twip = 0.01763888889 millimeters

How to convert twips to millimeters

To convert twips to millimeters, multiply the number of twips by 0.01763888889. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 56.69291339 (rounded).

millimeters = twips × 0.01763888889

Example: 10 twips = 0.1763888889 millimeters.

About these units

Twip (twip)

Typography & screenCurrent unit

1/20 of a point (1/1,440 inch). Used in the Rich Text Format specification and some software.

A contraction of twentieth of a point, the twip is a deliberately tiny unit meant for software that wants whole-number layout. Wikipedia gives it as 1/20 point, or 1/1440 inch, about 17.64 micrometers (0.01764 mm). That inch fraction only works if the point is the desktop publishing point of 1/72 inch, which is the definition the figure used here assumes.

Visual Basic 6 and earlier used twips as the default unit, and Microsoft's Rich Text Format uses them to exchange documents between platforms. OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice take it as their base length unit, and Symbian OS used it to scale bitmaps. Flash is a trap: its internal twips are really 1/20 of a logical pixel, which makes them three quarters of a true twip. Wikipedia's article also words the name two ways, as a twentieth of a point or of an inch point, and notes that it lacks citations.

1 twip = 0.00001763888889 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Twip; Wikipedia: Point (typography)

Millimeter (mm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.

Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.

Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.

1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

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