Talk:Traditional point-size names

Elite?

Am I confused to wonder why elite is not in this table given that pica is? cf. Pitch (typewriter) jhawkinson (talk) 08:08, 28 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect values for modern fonts

These values, which may be "historically correct" bear no resemblance to actual modern font sizes. I'm a design engineer and sometimes I use my CAD software to produce complex graphs and charts, whose fonts and font sizes need to match the text in the word processor software. Size of fonts is measured in mm in CAD software and points in the word processor. Thus I need an accurate means to convert. 11 pt font, for example, measured by using calipers to take the height of all the capitalised alphabet letters and taking the ceiling value over that set is 2.66mm on paper and on screen. This is a far cry from the stated 3.881 in the table for this article. In fact, only one single character (|) came close to this value (3.7mm). Can we change the table to reflect the average height of alphanumeric characters? At the moment the conversion is not useful because the map between sizes doesn't work in practice. If I want to produce CAD text at 11 pt and use these values I actually get text at 7-1/2 pt. It will vary across fonts, but at the moment the table is not fit for purpose. Polymath uk (talk) 11:40, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This has nothing to do with historical names or fonts being modern or not. The values in the table are font sizes, while you seem to be measuring the distance between the baseline and the caps line. Different fonts of the same size have different cap heights. They cannot be expected to match. The table is not supposed to be fit for your purpose in the first place. Relations between different font metrics are definitely out of the scope of this article if you ask me.

However, it seems questionable whether we can assume any particular standard of the point when talking about the traditional names of different naming systems. The millimeter values in the table appear to match modern PostScript points. This might be a convenient reference for metric people, but perhaps the column should be removed altogether. – MwGamera (talk) 21:50, 12 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]