Invisible schrieb:

> In other words, given a 10pt font, there is no way to determine how tall 
> or wide any of the letters are. (E.g., they could be 10pt, 1pt, 
> 1000pt...) This is very helpful. :-/

Exactly.

There's some meta-information in font files though.


> Still doesn't help me figure out how wide the letters of Courier 10pt 
> are. (Being a monospace font, all the letters should be the same width...)
> 
> As I say, it appears to be exactly 6pt. But I have no idea why...

Typewriters typically used a spacing of 10 or (less commonly) 12 
characters per inch, i.e. a character width of 7.2 pt (10 cpi) or 6.0 pt 
(12 cpi).

With 10 pt and 12 pt being the most common nominal font sizes on 
computers, it makes sense to design a pixed-pitch font to match the 
common typewriter pitch of 7.2 pt (to be able to print on forms 
originally designed for typewriters) at a nominal font size of 12 pt, as 
this also allows to emulate the 6.0 pt pitch by simply changing the 
nominal font size to 10 pt.

Hence the exact 6 pt pitch of the Courier font at a nominal font size of 
10 pt.

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