We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Printing Materials 263
approximately the same height. But there were shades of difference according to the foundry which manufactured the type.
Following the general trend towards standardization, the printers and type foundries worked out an exact standard of measurement. The basis of this standard is the ''point," which is one-seventy-second of an inch. Accordingly, a 6-point letter is now precisely one-twelfth of an inch in height no matter who casts the letter.
Because the point is too small a unit of measure for the height of many lines, a second standard has been adopted — the "Pica." This measures 1 2 points, or one-sixth of an inch. In measuring the height of large type it is more convenient to figure by picas than by points, just as it is more convenient sometimes to use the foot than the inch in linear measure.
Height as applied to type connotes the space from the top to the bottom of the type body.
The type face may have three parts — the body, the ascender and the descender. Letters like t, k and 1 have ascenders, while g, p, q and y have descenders. Therefore letters of a definite point size are not always exactly equal in height. For example, one 1 2 -point letter may be slightly larger than another 12 -point letter because of the ascender and descender. Therefore the point is merely an indication of the size of the base and not the size of the letter. Long ascenders mean small bodies, and short ascenders give more room for the body.
The width of a letter is measured by the unit "em." This gets its name from the fact that the m is the most nearly square of the letters. Each type face has its own "em" measure, which is the square of the face. Thus a 6-point "em" is just half as wide and half as high as a 1 2-point or "pica em." (The "em," other than the "pica em," is used only in figuring composition because the printer is paid for the number of "ems" set.)
Only two dimensions are used in specifying type, because the third dimension is a constant factor — it being understood that type will be "type high" to make an impression on paper.
The standard type sizes, measured in points, are 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24 and 30. It is evident that in the smaller
18