The life and extraordinary adventures of a typographical point

I just had a cross-cultural encounter with type size and decided to write this post for all my friends who love words and particularly post for my mother–the poet, English professor and letter press printer of the family.I was helping a good friend proof read a CV recently. For anyone who has ever fought with Word’s (or in my case Open Office’s) formatting functions you know that the most difficult part of writing the CV can be getting the formatting just right while fending off the auto-format and hyperlink functions. I’d made a couple of suggestions and gotten a second draft back. At this point the language was perfect and all the commas were in the right spot (the CV was excellent to start with). However, I thought the type size was a bit small. I kept tagging lines with comments like “check this is 12 point!” but the resume would come back to me and the type would be 10.5. My friend mentioned he had set all the type to 5. What was 5?I was starting to feel frustrated when it hit me. Why was I assuming that a Chinese word processor would necessarily be using English point size? I typed into google “Chinese versus English text size” and sure enough came up with a chart from Wikipedia that showed the equivalent of English point sizes in Chinese. 10.5 was 5 in Chinese and 12 was “small 4.” Not only was our communication problem solved but I learned something about type sizes in China, which as a printmaker made my day Why hadn’t I thought about that before? In graduate school I spent a year studying the printing industries in Hangzhou in the Sung Dynasty. I knew about the development of the printing industry in China using woodblocks and even movable type (though it was found too cumbersome for the Chinese language). And where did the “point” we use in Word come from? I found a little fun reading about point size, which was standardized in France during the 1700’s, which you can read below. Correspondence to Chinese font sizes–From Wikipedia In China, point size is not used much; instead the following Chinese size names are used (e.g. in the Chinese version of Microsoft Word): Chinese size name Translation Equivalent point size chū (初) “initial” 42 points xiǎo chū (小初) “small initial” 36 points yī (一) “one” 26 points xiǎo yī (小一) “small one” 24 points èr (二) “two” 22 points xiǎo èr (小二) “small two” 18 points sān (三) “three” 16 points xiǎo sān (小三) “small three” 15 points sì (四) “four” 14 points xiǎo sì (小四) “small four” 12 points wǔ (五) “five” 10.5 points xiǎo wǔ (小五) “small five” 9 points liù (六) “six” 7.5 points xiǎo liù (小六) “small six” 6.5 points qī (七) “seven” 5.5 points bā (八) “eight” 5 points The character “号” in simplified Chinese or “號” in traditional Chinese (pinyin hào, English: “size”) is appended to the Chinese name when it is not obvious that a font size is being referred to.

 81. The life and extraordinary adventures of a typographical point.

“What should one know about a point? The word stems from the Latin punctum. Point is a unit of the typographical measurement system—typometry. Before the typographic point was invented, font sizes were differentiated by their names. Say, “cicero” (12 points) was so named because Cicero’s works were first printed in 1467 using this font size.

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The idea of fontsize standardization dates back to the 17th century, but the first easy-to-handle typographic point was proposed only in 1737 by the French printer and typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier. According to his system, every fontsize was equal to a certain number of points: nonpareil—6, petit—8 etc. In France of that period a common linear measurement unit was toise, which was equal to 6 Royal feet (pied de roi). The foot was equal to 12 inches; the inch was divided into 12 lines; the line—into 12 metric points. The length of two of these points was adopted as one typographic point in a booklet published by Fournier…”

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