As I looked through past entries on this goal I realized that I wanted to contribute some content that might help people complete this goal. These are mostly notes to myself that I thought I would share. I might even turn this whole project into a zine .

Some of these terms I made up, because they weren’t referenced in any of the typography books that I have read (which is quite a few). The TOP LINE and BOTTOM LINE are my terms for the upper most and lower most boundary of the glyphs. All glyphs share these are maximal boundaries.

The width of a glyph is also something that is hard to define. Stylistically, most fonts have uniform heights for capitals, lowercase, as well as uniform dimensions for the ascenders and descenders, but there is no special term for the width of a glyph. The average width (the sum of all glyphs/ the number of glyphs) is considered the width of a non-proportional/monospaced font. For proportional/monospaced fonts the character width is the same for all the characters. There is no special term for a characters width or on how it is calculated. For my purposes the width is distance between the furthest lateral elements of any particular glyph.

The height of the lowercase letters is called X-HEIGHT or corpus. It is calculated from the BASE LINE to the MEAN LINE. The mean line is calculated using either the mean average of maximal height of lowercase letter, or the optical center, or is arbitrarily defined.

The BASE LINE is just that, the base line for the font. The majority of glyphs will sit on this line. DESCENDERS are the elements of a glyph that pass below the BASE LINE. ASCENDERS are the elements that pass above the MEAN LINE.

What’s the middle of the characters? The TRUE CENTER LINE is the distance between the BOTTOM LINE and the TOP LINE. The OPTICAL CENTER LINE is what appears to be the horizontal center for the font. It is something that is arrived at by looking at the glyphs. We tend to perceive the horizontal center differently than it mathematically is. The weight and shape of the glyphs affect our perception of this characteristic. The vertical middle of the character is the distance between the most extreme lateral points of a glyph. I haven’t found any mention as to the optical middle of individual glyphs.

NOTE: I tried my best to color the text in this post to match the picture. The site did not like me coloring the font, so I had to remove the html coding.