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Pitch is the number of letters, numbers and spaces in one inch (25.4 mm) of running text, that is, characters per inch (abbreviated cpi), measured horizontally. [1] [2] The pitch was most often used as a measurement of the size of typewriter fonts as well as those of impact printers used with computers.
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 ...
Fonts originally consisted of a set of moveable type letterpunches purchased from a type foundry. As early as 1600, the sizes of these types—their "bodies" [ 1 ] —acquired traditional names in English, French, German, and Dutch, usually from their principal early uses. [ 2 ]
In metal type, the point size of the font describes the height of the metal body on which the typeface's characters were cast. In digital type, letters of a font are designed around an imaginary space called an em square. When a point size of a font is specified, the font is scaled so that its em square has a side length of that particular ...
As books are most often printed with proportional fonts, cpp of a given font is usually a fractional number. For example, an 11-point font (like Helvetica) may have 2.4 cpp, [5] [6] thus a 5-inch (30-pica) line of a usual octavo-sized (6×8 in) book page would contain around 72 characters (including spaces). [7] [8]
The actual, physical height of any given portion of the font depends on the user-defined DPI setting, current element font-size, and the particular font being used. To make style rules that depend only on the default font size, another unit was developed: the rem. The rem «rem Unite», or root-em, is the font size of the root element of the ...
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.
Diagram of font metrics showing where letters and symbols would be placed relative to each other. The letters would change size according to the font type, typographic unit and dimension used. Metric typographic units have been devised and proposed several times to overcome the various traditional point systems .