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Typography

Where the Measure Comes From

·7 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Nearly every guide to setting a page quotes a number in characters: 45 to 75, 66 as the ideal, 40 as the floor for a column. The work those numbers are said to rest on was done in picas, on paper, decades before anyone set continuous text on a screen.1 The floor at 40 characters, which this essay was once built on, is not in that work at all.2

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • What Tinker reported
  • The error rate nobody recorded
  • What the return sweep actually does
  • When the measure itself is varied
  • What Bringhurst gives, and what he does not
  • From characters to picas
  • The twenty per cent that keeps being quoted
  • What to set the measure by

About the book

Notes

  1. Tinker 1963, Ch. 6 Summary, points 2 and 3; Ch. 7 Summary, points 3 and 4; Lonsdale 2014, Discussion of the Paterson and Tinker typeface study: 10-point, 19-pica line, about 52 characters in Scotch Roman. Tinker’s own summary gives safety zones in picas against a type size, never an optimum and never a character count. The inch equivalents here are converted at 6 picas to the inch. The three-inch figure attached to his name in the earlier draft came from the Paterson and Tinker experiments, whose standard line was 80 mm. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.
  2. Tinker 1963, Ch. 6 Summary, point 3 (fixation pauses in very short lines); Ch. 7, Table 7.8 and discussion (9-pica and 8-pica lines); Ch. 7 Summary, point 4. Tinker states the short-line penalty in picas for a given type size and in terms of fixations. No source consulted for this edition states a minimum in characters, so the 40-character floor of the earlier draft is unsupported rather than merely imprecise. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.

Sources

  • Tinker, M. A. (1963). Legibility of Print. Ames: Iowa State University Press. gwern.net
  • Lonsdale, M. dos S. (2014). Typographic features of text: outcomes from research and practice. Visible Language, 48(3). visiblelanguage.herokuapp.com

Further reading