Point (typography)

Common card · No. 291114

In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point has been between 0.18 and 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the desktop publishing (DTP) point as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an inch (or exactly 0.3527 mm) and, as with earlier American point sizes, is considered to be 1⁄12 of a pica. In metal type, the point size of a font describes the height of the metal body on which that font's characters were cast. In digital type, letters of a computer font are designed around an imaginary space called an "em square". When the point size of a font is specified, the font is scaled so that its em square has a side length of that particular length...

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