How Many Pixels in an EM?

In the interest of creating CSS-only layouts, it often makes sense to emulate CSS properties that IE doesn't support by using IE-only expressions. An example is the work of Svend Tofte in emulating max-width, which I reference quite often even though it is now 2 years old. I recently created a min-width expression based on this. Here is Svend's expression for max-width:

width:expression( document.body.clientWidth > (500/12) *
parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize)? "30em": "auto" );

Quite nice, but requires a bit of experimentation to get it to work right. In Svend's words:

Basically, with document.body.clientWidth, we get how wide the browser
window is. Using parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize), we get the font
size in pt's, that the user has currently set. I experimented, and at 12pts (the
normal size), the browser window gets wider then 30em's, at more or less 500
pixels. Of course, it's then a small matter, of calculating backwards, in the
scale, and see, if that if the default font size is 14pt (larger), then 30em's
will be exceeded at 583 pixels (roughly). The sad thing is, that you will need
to find the magic number, for whatever width you want for your letters. For
30ems, 500 pixels is the magic number.

Just as a reference for myself, I began tabulating the width of a 1em-wide div at various font sizes. In other words, I took screen captures and measured them in Photoshop.

body{
font-size: 500pt;
}

div{
background-color:black;
width:1em;
}

This yields a div that is 667 pixels wide.

Then I realized that if I graphed the pixel width of the div versus the font size in ems, a nice curve emerged, which meant to me that there must be a common factor. So, I took the pixel width of the largest measurement and divided it by the pt size of the font:

667px/500pt = 1.334

A little bit of algebra yields the formulae:

px per em = 1.334 * pts

and

px = ems*1.334*pts

I tested this out in IE and Firefox with serif, sans-serif, and monospaced font families, and it holds true regardless of font size. Applying it to Svend's original expression gives me the following max-width expression (where the desired max-width = 30em):

width:expression( document.body.clientWidth > (30*1.334)*
parseInt(document.body.currentStyle.fontSize)? "30em": "auto" );

Hope you like it... Please comment if you find it doesn't work for you!