Have you ever wondered why fonts use points, or what that unit of measure is in Photoshop – the Pica?  Did you know that pixes and screen fonts are very much related to old school printing?  Here’s the place where I can bring it all together for you.  First the definitions:

Points

There are 72 points in an inch.

Picas

There are 12 points in a Pica.

Printing

Standard printing methods use points and picas to measure the size of fonts and paper or other objects on the print.  For instance a newspaper may use a 12 point (1 pica) font on a peice of paper.  Try dividing a regular 8.5 x 11 peice of paper into thirds.  It’s much easier to say 11 inches is 66 picas, so it’d be three 22 pica folds instead of every 3.66 inches.

Pixels and Screen Typography

It’s interesting to see the correlation of old school typesetting when looking at modern day computers.  The standard resolution is 72 pixels per inch, which means each pixel is one point.  That makes things easy.  Did you ever wonder why the largest font size in Word is 72?  It’s because that font should be one inch high on you screen – and who would want to go bigger than that?

I just learned all of this from a customer of mine recently.  Have anything to add?

Printing, Picas, Points, and Pixels: How’re they related? is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson

I just submitted my first shirt.woot.com shirt design ever. If you’re a wooter, please vote for it. Click on the image to the right.

I hope to be a part of every derby going forward. Maybe some day I’ll win. Who knows…

-JKT

Woot Shirt Design #1 is a post from: jtGraphic: James Thompson