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About these units
Pica (pica)
A pica is another typographic unit, equal to 12 points, or 1/6 of an inch, making it larger and more suited to structural layout than to fine detail. Picas are commonly used to measure text blocks, column widths, margins, and line lengths in print and digital page design. The pica originated alongside the point in printing traditions stretching back to the 18th and 19th centuries. It offered a convenient intermediate scale—small enough for precise adjustments but large enough for practical page design. When newspapers became widespread, picas helped designers rapidly calculate column grids and organize dense printed pages. Even as publishing tools evolved into software like Adobe InDesign and LaTeX, picas remain deeply integrated into the workflow of book designers, typographers, and professional printers. They are part of a system that allows page elements to be arranged with precision, ensuring that every visual aspect of a document aligns harmoniously.
Mil (mil)
A mil is an imperial-derived engineering unit equal to one-thousandth of an inch. It is used extensively in manufacturing, machining, and electrical engineering. Printed circuit board (PCB) trace widths, for instance, are often measured in mils because the unit provides a convenient scale for precision without resorting to decimals in inches. Because 1 mil equals 25.4 micrometers, it occupies a scale appropriate for tolerances in industrial production, coatings, film thickness, and gaskets. The mil is especially common in the United States, where certain engineering standards still rely on the imperial system. It provides an intuitive small-scale measurement for technicians accustomed to inches, helping avoid errors that might result from metric conversions.