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In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point has been between 0.18 and 0.4 millimeters.
Note that the Chinese font sizes use American points; the Continental systems traditionally used the Fournier or Didot points. The Fournier points, being smaller than Didot's, were associated with the names of the Didot type closest in size rather than identical in number of points. [citation needed]
The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points; [5] point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing point of 1 ⁄ 72 in (0.0139 in or 0.35 mm).
In typography, the body height or point size refers to the height of the space in which a glyph is defined. The metal sort: b is the body or shank, c is the body height or font size. Originally, in metal typesetting, the body height or the font (or point) size was defined by the height of the lead cuboid on which the actual font face is moulded.
In metal type, the point size (and hence the em, from em quadrat) was equal to the line height of the metal body from which the letter rises. In metal type, the physical size of a letter could not normally exceed the em. A digital font's design space in digital type is called the em, which is a grid with arbitrary resolution.
The traditional typographic units are based either on non-metric units, or on odd multiples (such as 35 ⁄ 83) of a metric unit.There are no specifically metric units for this particular purpose, although there is a DIN standard sometimes used in German publishing, which measures type sizes in multiples of 0.25 mm, and proponents of the metrication of typography generally recommend the use of ...
A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a Roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase "A"s, and 34 lowercase "a". The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language.
This list of monospaced typefaces details standard monospaced fonts used in classical typesetting and printing. Samples of Monospaced typefaces Typeface name