15 Feb
2010
15 Feb
'10
1:19 p.m.
On 15/02/2010 19:41, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
Having come from the reprographics and printing industry in the days of
early phototypesetting and long before DTP, I can back up Rich's
assertion. A point is not exactly 1/72"; there are indeed 72.27 points
to the inch in conventional typography.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Rich wrote:
Technically,
100/7227 inch, which is to say, there are 72.27 points per inch
in typography prior to the creation of the Macintosh. (I don't believe that
Postscript originally used a 1/72 measure, and TeX certainly didn't, so I can't
just say "non-computerized typography".)
I'm pretty sure when I learned typography the numbers I was taught was that Cicero
was 6 lines to the inch, and that it was a 12 point font. Maybe neither of those numbers
are actually correct. That was all before I had used computers although I think it's
possible that Postscript was a glimmer in someone's eye by that point.