![]() London and New York: Longmann, Green, and Co. ↑ Legros, Lucien Alphonse Grant, John Cameron (1916).The typographic pica should not be confused with the Pica font of the typewriters, which means a font where 10 typed characters make up a line one inch long. Similar tables exist as well with which one can estimate the number of characters per pica knowing the lower-case alphabet length. There have existed copyfitting tables for a number of typefaces, and typefoundries often provided the number of characters per pica for each type in their specimen catalogs. For example, an 11-point font (like Helvetica) may have 2.4 cpp, thus a 5-inch (30-pica) line of a usual octavo-sized (6×8 in) book page would contain around 72 characters (including spaces). As books are most often printed with proportional fonts, cpp of a given font is usually a fractional number. The font length is measured there by the number of characters per pica ( cpp). The pica is also used in measuring the font capacity and is applied in the process of copyfitting. Publishing applications such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress represent pica measurements with whole-number picas left of a lower-case p, followed by the points number, for example: 5p6 represents 5 picas and 6 points, or 5 1⁄ 2 picas.Ĭascading Style Sheets (CSS) defined by the World Wide Web Consortium use pc as the abbreviation for pica ( 1⁄ 6 of an inch), and pt for point ( 1⁄ 72 of an inch). The contemporary computer PostScript pica is exactly 1⁄ 6 of an inch or 1⁄ 72 of a foot, i.e. ![]() In TeX one pica is 400⁄ 2,409 of an inch. It was established by the United States Type Founders' Association in 1886. The French pica of 12 Didot points (also called cicero) generally is: 12 × 0.376 = 4.512 mm (0.1776 in).In printing, three pica measures are used: One pica is further divided into 12 points. The pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to approximately 1⁄ 6 of an inch, or from 1⁄ 68 to 1⁄ 73 of a foot. It should be noted, however, that much of Europe is moving to purely metric measurements.A ruler showing Pica scale (on the top) and Agate scale (on the bottom) Thus, 30 picas-or approximately 5 inches-actually equal 4.98 inches. Picas and points do not have an exact relationship to inches. In the American-British system, it is convenient to remember 6 picas equal one inch, 12 points equal one pica, and 72 points equal one inch-but it's not exactly true. The Mediaan system, however, has largely been replaced by the Didot system.įor general, practical measurement purposes, three decimal places (thousandths of an inch) are deemed sufficient significant digits. ![]() The Mediaan em, or cicero, measures 0.165 inch. Once used principally in Belgium, the Mediaan system has a corps (or point) equal to 0.01374 inch. The Didot corps (or Didot point) measures 0.0148 inch. Used primarily in Europe, the Didot system uses the cicero as its basic unit, which is equal to 12 corps, or 0.178 inch. Thus, 1,000 lines of pica-or 12-point-matter measure 166 inches, and 1,000 lines of 6-point matter measure 83 inches. One point is equal to one-twelfth of a pica. The standard of measurement is the 0.166-inch pica and the 0.01383-inch point. This is the point system used throughout North America and Great Britain. At one time, there were three point systems in use worldwide:Īmerican-British System. Calculations are simplified by assuming each point is one-seventy-second of an inch. Each size is described by its number of points (called its point size see Point Size), which referred to the height of the body on which it is cast. ![]() The system dates from early handset metal type, where the sizes of type cast by type founders were graduated on a uniform "point" scale.
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