Comment 3 for bug 166998

In almost all cases, inkscape converts inches/mm/pt etc. to
"user units" (same as CSS px in absence of a viewBox
attribute or transforms), to avoid disproportionate scaling
in different display environment.

If Inkscape were to literally specify font size in pt and
curves in px (rather than silently converting
inches,mm,pt,etc. to px at a rate of 90px/inch), then
different parts of the drawing will scale at different rates
when moving between paper & screen, which is rarely what you
want, and indeed the SVG spec (same page as referred to
above) recommends against doing this.

By specifying things in CSS px rather than inches or mm or
pt, the drawing will be bigger on screen and smaller on
paper, which is usually what you want given that you hold a
piece of paper in your hand closer than a monitor and things
are more readable at smaller sizes on paper than on screen.
If by chance you want the drawing to be shown at roughly the
same number of inches on screen as on paper, and if you
don't mind using the XML editor (Ctrl+Shift+X) to do it,
then give the outermost <svg> element width & height
attributes specified in mm or in or pt, and a viewBox
attribute: see
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/coords.html#ViewBoxAttribute.

(See
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1276048&group_id=93438&atid=604306
for more comments on SVG units and how to indicate sizes to
users.)

Consequently I'm retitling this bug.