Invisible schrieb:
>>> Well, by a series of experiments, I have discovered that the neither 
>>> the character width or character hight of Courier 10pt is actually 
>>> 10pt. The distance from the baseline to the capline is more like 
>>> 5.5pt or something, and the distance between characters appears to be 
>>> exactly 6pt...
>>
>> Yes, the "pt" in fonts is a rather arbitrary measurement. I guess in 
>> traditional typesetting it would refer to the height of the metal 
>> "block" from which the letters were cut, so even there it would be 
>> only indirectly related to the actual glyph dimensions.
> 
> Well, the glyph will be smaller than the metal block to allow some 
> whitespace around the glyph. But you'd think 10pt would be either the 
> width or the hieght of the block... Apparently it is neither.

Note that the block had to accomodate not only capital letters, but also 
underliners, as well as accent symbols above capital letters; so if the 
capital letters are 5.5 pt in height, a block height of 10 pt appears 
realistic to me.

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