For various purposes I need to know the width of a given text. The easiest way to do this is to use the \widthof{} command from the calc package. Issue is that I can't understand what unit of measurement is this command using. I expected it to be pt, but the number gets so big that it can't possibly be that.
The following MWE, for instance, will print the value 2081098:
\documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{calc}
\newcounter{a}
\begin{document}
\setcounter{a}{\widthof{asdasd}}
\thea
\end{document}
The package documentation doesn't indicate the unit of measurement.