What is the mathematical relation between font size and printer output?

[johny10151981]

hello all,

what is the mathematical relation between font size and printer output. I am little confused. cause all I am doing is guessing the size and printing. But what is the proper rules to figure out the proper size that will be printed on page?

in Win32 of course.

Thank you.

[Stewart Ross]

Hi. There is no easy answer to your question, as proportionally-spaced fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial have widely different letter widths for nominally the same letter at nominally the same point size (a measurement of vertical space taken by the font, where 12 points = 1/6 inch in old British/American measurement systems).

Also, the x-height of the font (the height of the lower-case letter x, which also is similar to the height of other letter components) varies between font families of the same nominal point size - so Arial for instance takes up more space for the same text at the same point size than Times does, as Times in general has smaller x-heights and letter widths than Arial does.

If you do a web search on typography in general you can learn a lot about font design.

Without access to the detailed font metrics that accompany the font family concerned it is virtually impossible to come up with exact estimates of the space taken up by text in a proportional font. It is possible to approximate it, but even that would be just guesswork for the most part.

-Stewart