4 ms·
The inconsistency between cap height and em size has existed in fonts since XVI century. Why do you think it was unintentional? Do you think it is inertia that
by artem247 6y ago
The inconsistency between cap height and em size has existed in fonts since XVI century. Why do you think it was unintentional?
Do you think it is inertia that held font designers for five hundred years to not to make cap height the measure of the font size? Why different cap height were tolerated?
- ric2b 6y agoThe article addresses this. The physical constraints that lead to those conventions don't apply to digital typography.
- artem247 6y agoI don't think that it does to be honest. I think author does not understand typography, he did some Googling and tinkering with font software and that's about it. The real story is more complicated. Yes there is no 'em size' as a physical constraint in digital world. Yet the concept that the 'em size' represents is very important for a font. Font is more than the collection of glyphs (shapes of letters). Things like em size and default line height may seem arbitrary but they are important decisions made by font designer that should be respected by users of the font.
- irrational 6y agoWell, now you need to make the argument for why they need to be respected by users. I don't see why they need to be.
- spiralx 6y agoIn printed text you would mostly have seen a single font used on a page, if not for the whole work. There's no inconsistency when there's a single font, especially not when the only variations are the odd piece of italics, a few (pretty much pre-defined) styles for headings, footnotes etc. and no zoom or different display devices. If you could turn a paperback sideways and have the text flip it would look pretty bad - lots of the layout and text is either hard-coded or even manually applied based on the physical format.