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![]() (What’s the point of knowing what’s a point?)īut we have at least one holdover from the olden days: “agate.” Still called “ruby” in England, the official measurement of “agate” is 5.5 points, about 1.81 millimeters. But though design programs usually use “point” and “pica” for measurement, most word processing programs simply list numbers for type size. Type sizes in word processing programs are standardized, most to Adobe’s PostScript standards or “DTP point,” for “desktop publishing point.” In the modern world, a “pica” is exactly one-sixth of an inch, so a “point” is. Can’t we all just get along?įortunately, computers, which have no national boundaries, have come to our rescue. (The basis of this was the “Johnson pica,” exactly 0.166 inch.) The Japanese “point” is. In the United States, with its imperial system, the “point” was standardized in 1886 to be equal to. In Europe, the standard is not just the “point,” but the “didot point,” declared in 1973 to be equal to. Remember, the Paris inch was longer than the American inch, and most of the world is on the metric system now. So everyone was on the same page now, right? About 40 years later, Françoise-Ambroise Didot refined Fournier’s system, changing the measurement of a point to be exactly 1/72 of a Paris inch and replacing names of type sizes with numbers. ![]() (Back then, each letter was on a different block of wood or metal, which were assembled by hand to make a word, a line, a book.) In 1737, Pierre-Simon Fournier used the Paris inch, a now-obscure measurement equal to 1.0657 inch, creating a scale of 6 “ciceros” to the Paris inch. ![]() The French were among the first to decide to standardized type sizes, in part to make it easier for publishers to share their letters. The size of points themselves differed from foundry to foundry. Here’s a description of “agate” from The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, published in 1894, a dense but fascinating history of type around the world.Īgate in America, or ruby in England (half small pica), was, in fact, originally a nonpareil with short ascenders and descenders, cast on a smaller body, or sometimes a pearl, on a larger, to look open but now some founders have a distinct specimen for this size. About the only one we still use today is “agate.” There was the “small pica,” approximately the same size as the “cicero,” equal to about 11 points, and the “double small pica,” about 22 points. Among the smallest was “diamond.” Other type sizers were called “pearl,” “agate,” “nonpareil,” “minion,” “cicero,” etc., without a lot of rhyme or reason, and the names varied by country. ![]() Instead, groups of type had names, which indicated their relative sizes (and sometimes font). Though its etymology is unclear, “pica” has been a typographical term since at least the mid-16th century, the Oxford English Dictionary says, representing a specific size of type, about, er, 12 “points.”īack then, individual foundries made their own pieces of type, and there was not much numerical standardization. The width of printed columns, by contrast, is measured in something called “picas.” Conveniently, 12 “points” equal one “pica” 6 picas equal 1 inch.īut it was not always the case. In the days before computer publishing, headline orders were often given as something like “2-36-2 Bodoni,” two columns wide, 36-point Bodoni type, two lines. You need to know, for example, that the size of the type is measured in “points.” Ordinary body type might be something like 10 “points,” with headlines starting around 12 “points.” In this measurement, 72 points equals an inch. People who work for newspapers often have to be familiar with a different measurement system than inches and feet.
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