NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Leading

In typography, leading (IPA [ˈlɛdɪŋ], rhymes with heading) refers to the amount of added vertical spacing between lines of type. In consumer-oriented word processing software, this concept is usually referred to as "line spacing." Leading may sometimes be confused with tracking, which refers to the horizontal spacing between letters or characters. Image File history File links Leading. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet can be used to show pronounciation in English. ... Look up space#Verb in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In typography, tracking is the process of uniformly increasing or decreasing the space between all glyphs (letters) in a block of text. ...

The word comes from lead strips that were put between set lines. When type was set by hand in printing presses, slugs or strips of lead (reglets) of appropriate thicknesses were inserted between lines of type to add vertical space, to fill available space on the page. The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. ... For Pb as an abbreviation, see PB. General Name, Symbol, Number lead, Pb, 82 Chemical series Post-transition metals or poor metals Group, Period, Block 14, 6, p Appearance bluish gray Standard atomic weight 207. ...

Text set "solid" (no leading) appears cramped, with ascenders almost touching descenders from the previous line. The lack of white space between lines makes it difficult for the eye to track from one line to the next, and hampers readability. 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, highlighted in red. ... Look up readability in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

This block of text at 100% leading is also easy to read, but makes less efficient use of vertical page space:

In CSS, leading is implemented by the line-height property. In web development, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. ...

Categories: Typography | Whitespace This article does not cite any references or sources. ... A page is one side of a leaf of paper. ... Pagination is the system by which pages of a book, play, manuscript, or otherwise handwritten or printed document, are marked with consecutive arabic numbers, to indicate the proper order of the pages. ... The recto of a broadsheet, pamphlet or any printed document is the side that is meant to be read first or the right-hand page of a folded sheet. ... The verso of a broadsheet, pamphlet or any printed document is the side that is meant to be read second or the left-hand page of a folded sheet. ... 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... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... 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, 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). ... Examples or headline letter-spacing In typography, letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Capital letters or majuscules (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... 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, highlighted in red. ... Example of a letter with a diacritic A diacritical mark or diacritic, 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). ... A subscript is a number, figure, or indicator that appears below the normal line of type, typically used in a formula, mathematical expression, or description of a chemical compound. ... This article is about the term superscript as used in typography. ... For the origin and evolution of fonts, see History of western typography. ... In typography, serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... A sample of the Rockwell typeface, a slab serif font In typography, a slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif or egyptian) typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. ... In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ... Blackletter in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. ... Kuenstler Script is an example of a formal script. ... A dingbat is an ornament or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a printers ornament. The term supposedly originated as onomatopoeia in old style metal-type print shops, where extra space around text or illustrations would be filled by dinging an ornament into the space... 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. ... 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. ... A case of cast metal type pieces and typeset matter in a composing stick Movable type is the system of printing and typography using movable pieces of metal type, made by casting from matrices struck by letterpunches. ... Contemporary Calligraphy Calligraphy (from Greek kallos beauty + grapháº½ writing) is the art of beautiful writing (Mediavilla 1996: 17). ... 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. ... For the origin and evolution of fonts, see History of western typography. ... In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size of a particular typeface. ... 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. ... A point is a unit of measure in typography. ... 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 em is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the pt size of the current font. ... An en is a typographic unit, half of the width of an em. ... 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. ... A character encoding or character set (sometimes referred to as code page) consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers... 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 (lower rows) and without hinting (upper rows) at 100% (above) and 400% (below). ...