NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Em (typography)

An em is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the point size of the current font. This unit is not defined in terms of any specific typeface, and thus is the same for all fonts at a given point size.^[1] So, 1 em in a 16 point typeface is 16 points. Typographic units are the units of measurement used in typography or typesetting. ... A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. ... Point, in typography, may also refer to a dot grapheme (e. ... A font can mean: A member of a typeface family; or digital font - file format that encapsulates a typeface family in a database. ... Measurement is the determination of the size or magnitude of something. ... â€œFontâ€ redirects here. ... Point, in typography, may also refer to a dot grapheme (e. ...

History

In metal type, the point size (and hence the em) is measured as the height of the metal body from which the letter rises. In metal type (possible overhangs aside), the physical size of a letter could not normally exceed the em. Image File history File links Metal_type. ... Image File history File links Metal_type. ...

In digital type, the em is a grid of arbitrary resolution that is used as the design space of a digital font. Imaging systems, whether for screen or for print, work by scaling the em to a specified point size.

In digital type, the relationship of the height of particular letters to the em is arbitrarily set by the typeface designer. However, as a very rough guideline, an "average" font might have a cap height of 70% of the em, and an x-height of 48% of the em.

Incorrect and alternate definitions

One em is sometimes said to be equal to the width of a capital "M" in a particular typeface, as the "M" was commonly cast the full-width of the square "blocks", or "em-quads" (also "mutton-quads"), which are used in printing presses. However, in modern typefaces the character M is usually somewhat less than one em wide. Moreover, as the term has expanded to include a wider variety of languages and character sets, its meaning has evolved; this has allowed it to include those fonts, typefaces, and character sets which do not include a capital "M", such as Chinese and the Arabic alphabet. Thus, em generally means the height of a font in question. Perpetua is a transitional classification serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the Monotype foundry in 1925. ... Calisto is an old style serif typeface designed in 1987 for the Monotype foundry by Ron Carpenter, British typographer, born 1950. ... For other uses of M, see M (disambiguation). ... The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. ... A font can mean: A member of a typeface family; or digital font - file format that encapsulates a typeface family in a database. ... Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. ...

This is the traditional definition shown in the Adobe Glossary and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary Third revised edition 1996.

Related terms

An "em-quad" is a metal spacer used in printing presses. It is referred to by this name because it is composed of a square one em on each side. In these old-fashioned printing presses, this allowed the insertion of an em space ( ) character between other typographical characters. It is also occasionally referred to as a "mutton quad". The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. ... A space is a punctuation convention for providing interword separation in some scripts, including the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. ...

The width of the em space ( ) is defined to be 1 em, as is the em dash (—). By contrast, the narrower unit en is half an em. A dash is a punctuation mark, and is not to be confused with the hyphen, which has quite different uses. ... An en is a typographic unit, half of the width of an em. ...

Online, the use of the em measurement has become more common; with the development of Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), the W3C best practices recommendations within HTML and online markup now call for web pages to be based on scalable designs, using a relative unit of measurement (such as the em measurement), rather than a fixed one such as pixels ("px") or points. CSS redirects here. ... CSS redirects here. ... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces standards—recommendations, as they call them—for the World Wide Web. ... HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. ... Markup refers to the use of a markup language to describe the structure and appearance of a particular document. ... In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability indicates the capability of a system to increase performance under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. ... This article is about the picture element. ... Point, in typography, may also refer to a dot grapheme (e. ...

References

Notes

This article refers to the city in British Columbia, Canada. ... The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) was founded in 1967 and originally named the Ohio College Library Center. ...

External links

A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. ... A page is one side of a leaf of paper. ... Pagination is the system by which the information on a newspaper, bookpage, manuscript, or otherwise handwritten or printed document are laid out. ... â€œRectoâ€ redirects here. ... In typography, a margin is the white space that surrounds the content of a page. ... An example of a two column layout with caption. ... Recto page from a rare Blackletter Bible (1497) In the field of book design, proportions of pages, type areas (print spaces), and margins of medieval books have been analyzed by scholars, and several canons of page construction have been described by them to represent the ways in which these books... A pull quote mockup using text from the article Wikipedia A pull quote (also known as a lift-out quote or a call-out) is a quotation or edited excerpt from an article that is placed in a larger typeface on the same page, serving to lead readers into an... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Block quoItalic textte A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea, or the words of an author. ... In typesetting, widow refers to the final line of a paragraph that falls at the top the following page of text, separated from the remainder of the paragraph on the previous page. ... In typography, leading (IPA , rhymes with heading) refers to the amount of added vertical spacing between lines of type. ... In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are visually unattractive gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text. ... In typography and penmanship, the baseline is the line upon which most letters sit and under which descenders extend. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... In typesetting, alignment, is the horizontal positioning and alignment of text or images within a line, typically relative to a column. ... In typesetting, justification is the setting of text or images within a column or measure to align along both the left and right margin. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Ligature (palaeography). ... In typography, tracking is the process of uniformly increasing or decreasing the space between all glyphs (letters) in a block of text. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Williamsburg eighteenth century press letters Capital letters or majuscules (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, D, ...) are also simply called capitals, caps or upper case; manual typesetters kept them in the upper drawers of a desk, keeping the more frequently used minuscule letters on the lower shelf. ... Minuscule, or lower case, is the smaller form (case) of letters (in the Roman alphabet: a, b, c, ...). Originally alphabets were written entirely in majuscule (capital) letters which were spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. ... Initial P in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire Detail from a rare Blackletter Bible (1497) printed in Strasbourg by J.R.Grueninger. ... In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the height of the lowercase letter x in any font, which is usually the same for a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, and z. ... The ascenders are the parts of the characters that lie above the midline, highlighted in red. ... The descenders are the parts of the characters that lie below the baseline. ... Example of a letter with a diacritic A diacritic or diacritical mark, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... In typography, a counter is an area entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form or a symbol (the counter-space/ the hole of). ... This article is about the terms subscript and superscript as used in typography. ... This article is about the typesetters ornament. ... â€œFontâ€ redirects here. ... In typography, serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. ... In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ... In typography, italic type /tÃ¦lk/ or /atÃ¦lk/ refers to cursive typefaces based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. ... Bold and Boldface redirect here. ... Oblique type is not the same of Italic type - Italic (Cursive) type is based of Aldus Manutius caligraphy, and Oblique (Slanted) is a mere distortion. ... â€œFontâ€ redirects here. ... â€œBlack letterâ€ redirects here. ... Antiqua A facsimile of Nicholas Jensons roman type used in Venice circa 1470. ... In typography, serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. ... Didone is a typeface classification recognized by the Association Typographique Internationale (AtypI). ... A sample of the typeface Egyptienne, a slab serif face based on the Clarendon model. ... In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ... The term punctuation has two different linguistic meanings: in general, the act and the effect of punctuating, i. ... In typography, hanging punctuation is a way of typesetting punctuation marks, most commonly quotation marks, so that they do not disrupt the â€˜flowâ€™ of a body of text. ... A hyphen ( - ) is a punctuation mark. ... Quotation marks or inverted commas (also called quotes and speech marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech, a quotation, a phrase or a word. ... This article is not about the symbol for the set of prime numbers, â„™. The prime (â€², Unicode U+2032, ′) is a symbol with many mathematical uses: A complement in set theory: Aâ€² is the complement of the set A A point related to another (e. ... For other uses, see Dash (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Dash (disambiguation). ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Type design is the art of designing typefaces. ... A type foundry is a company that designs and/or distributes typefaces. ... For the weblog software, see Movable Type. ... Contemporary Western Calligraphy. ... Phototypesetting is a method of setting type with light (photo). ... Letterpress printing is the oldest printing technique, in which a raised surface is inked and then pressed against a smooth substance to obtain an image in reverse. ... â€œFontâ€ redirects here. ... A font can mean: A member of a typeface family; or digital font - file format that encapsulates a typeface family in a database. ... In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ... Point, in typography, may also refer to a dot grapheme (e. ... A pica (pronounced PIKE-ah, SAMPA /paIk@/) is a unit of measure traditionally used in document layout. ... A cicero (pronounced SIS-er-oh, IPA ) is a unit of measure traditionally used in document layout. ... An agate is a unit of typographical measure. ... An en is a typographic unit, half of the width of an em. ... // ETAOIN SHRDLU (often pronounced et-ee-oin shurd-loo) is the approximate order of frequency of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language, best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of hot type publishing due to a custom of Linotype... Using lorem ipsum to focus attention on graphic elements in a website design proposal. ... In type design and typography, the word Hamburgefonts (alternatively styled HAMBURGEFONTS or hamburgefonts) is a word used to sample a font. ... In traditional typography, punchcutting is the process by which matrices were made in hard metal for type founding in the early days. ... Look up pangram in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes referred to as code page) with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the... Font rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description (as found in scalable fonts such as TrueType fonts) to a raster or bitmap description. ... A font test with hinting (lower rows) and without hinting (upper rows) at 100% (above) and 400% (below). ...

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