The Professional Look – Part VI
The Professional Look, The Complete Guide to Desktop Publishing, is a book I co-authored with Scott Tilden in 1991. Each Thursday I post an excerpt from the chapter I wrote about typography. Many of you dye-subbers also design some of the graphics you print, which includes setting type. Hopefully these posts will give you new insights into typography. Click here for my previous post.
Measuring type
We measure the size of a typeface in points from the bottom of a letter that goes below the baseline (called a descender) to the top of the tallest letter (either an ascender or capital letter).
The baseline is the invisible line on which all the capital letters and characters without descenders sit. Pick a good adverb to measure your ascenders and descenders; the ly has an ascender and descender conveniently side by side.
You’ll find that all 10-point type does not look to be the same size. Ten-point Bookman font type, for instance, is not the same size as 10-point Times. Why?
Because the x-height or waist line of Bookman’s letters is much bigger than Times’s letters. The x-height is the size of a font’s lowercase letters. The height of a capital letter in any font is called its cap height or appearing size. The cap height is generally two-thirds to three-quarters of the total height of a character.
For example, the cap height of a 72-point letter is usually 48 to 54 points. The cap height of a 36-point letter is 24 to 27 points. The balance of the letter’s height is measured from the baseline to the bottom of a descender.
Next week: Leading: Controlling inner space, and Anatomy of type: The head and the body
Tags: acsender, baseline, cap height, descender, Professional Look, x-height
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
