Typography

Some questions seem to come up again and again. This post will address one such recurring question:

What font size should we use if the RFP calls for a font of X-pitch?

or the equivalent question:

What font size should we use if the RFP says to use a font with no more than X characters per inch?

This question arises somewhat regularly, but not often enough for most of us to remember the results of the last time we researched this question. So here it is:

 

Typographic Terminology

There are several methods typographers can use to measure character spacing (kerning) and line spacing (leading). Listed below are the definitions, and typical conversions you might need to employ.

Point

“Point” is a unit of measurement used in typography that is equal to 1/72-inch. It is used primarily for representing the height of characters and the amount of space between lines, also known as leading.

Pitch Transferred to Points

120/Pitch = Points

For example: 12 Pitch = 120/12 = 10 Points

Pica

“Pica” refers to a unit of measurement equal to 1/6 of an inch or 12 points. Pica and points can be used interchangeably and many typographers use pica as their standard unit of measurement.

Points Transferred to Pica

Points/12 = Pica

For example: 24 Points = 24 Points/12 = 2 Pica

Pitch

“Pitch” describes the width of a character. Pitch equals the number of characters that can fit side-by-side in 1 inch; for example, 10 pitch equals 10 characters-per-inch or 10 CPI. Pitch is a term generally used with non-proportional (fixed-width) fonts.

Point Transferred to Pitch

120/Points = Pitch

For example: 10 point = 120/10 = 12 Pitch

Twip

“Twip” is a unit of measurement equal to 1/20th of a printers point. There are 1440 twips to and inch, 567 twips to a centimeter.

Points Transferred to Twips

20*Points = Twips

For example: 10 Points = 20*10 Points = 200 Twips

 

For those who would like a bit more information than most of us, the following explains some of the difficulties that have arisen with these odd words.

Typographic Dinosaurs

First, the term pitch and its equivalent characters per inch are typographical holdovers from the days of fixed-width fonts and typeset printing. We still use other terms from that bygone era including the term leading, which refers to the amount of space between each line of text.

In old-fashioned typesetting a line of text was separated from the lines surrounding it by small pieces of lead that were inserted between the lines. Thus, the term leading.

Advanced typesetting used variable-width fonts and the typesetters adjusted the spacing between those characters with the same small pieces of lead. This was called kerning (between two characters) and tracking (between all the characters in a full line of text). But most people did not have access to this advanced typesetting and had to rely on typewriters, which used fixed-width fonts. Each character in a fixed-width font (such as Courier font) is exactly the same width as all the other characters. When communicating the desired kerning or tracking, the publisher would instruct the typesetter to use a particular pitch, which referred to the number of characters per inch. So, for example, the manager would tell the typesetter, “Please set this to 12-pitch” when he wanted no more than 12 characters per inch.

Fixed-width fonts are a thing of the past, but the term has survived and pops up from time to time in RFPs.