Feature request: REM units

[penkin]

Most websites these days are implimented using rem units of measure. This allows components and elements conform better to the environment they are being rendered in. It seems that all UI design tools sort of ignore this aspect of implimentation, everything always seems to be shown in px and a developer needs to know what the base font size has been set to and then manually calculate what the rem value would be.

What would maybe be useful is to have a base font size defined in the project settings, and then be able to show both the defined px value as well as the calculated rem value for that setting. For instance, if the base font size was set to 16px and the designer set a border radius of a button to 4px it could show the defined value as well as the calculated 0.25rem that the developer could use when building that button component.

[myfunnyandy]

At the Penpot team, we’ve been recently exploring ideas to allow designers to work with the same units as developers. We know there’re a lot of implications to take into account but this is definitely an area of oportunities to build bridges between design and code. We already have a story with some specifications to which I’ll add this post and this other one so we can keep these ideas in mind