Typographic Measurement - Typography lessons

The 'point' is the basic typographic measurement. The traditional value of the point was 1/72.272 inch. Desktop-publishing has change it to an exact 1/72 inch. The point (abbr. pt) is used often in the United States, where inches are used for paper sizes and illustration measurements, but is tedious and frustrating elsewhere because it does not correspond to metric units.

Points are the only units used in measuring type sizes but the traditional unit for measuring the width and depth of an area of type is the pica. A pica consists of 12 points. A measurement containing the two units example, 3 picas 5 points can be written as 3p5. However, in practice the point size of a type does not tell its apparent visual size, that is, different types of fonts if written in the same point size may not necessarily appear to be of the same size.

For example, fonts used for Bodytext such as Times, Helvetica or Caslon, are relatively consistent in their dimensional proportions than some decorative fonts. Sans-serif types tend to look slightly larger than serif fonts.