Re: Height/Width of Font (does line-height affect font appearance)

At 5:52 PM -0600 7/22/97, Neil St.Laurent wrote:
>Does the line-height attribute actually affect the vertical size of
>the font?

No, it adds or subtracts from the font's "native" line-height, which is
equivalent to its size.

>If not, does the font-size refer to the vertical size and
>the width is chosen based on the glyph definition?

If by vertical size you mean "unaltered line height" - yes. Widths are
glyph-specific. If the actual width of an M is 1em, it's an accident.

>Everything appears to just refer to font-size, except for the
>shorthand "font" which has line-height grouped in, which makes we
>wonder if it affects the font size at all.

Not sure what you mean by "line-height grouped in". In a 12-point font, the
actual distance from the top of the ascenders to the bottom of the
descenders is typically a bit less than 12-point, in order to keep these
from touching on contiguous lines when set without extra line height
(leading).

________________________________________
Todd Fahrner
mailto:fahrner@pobox.com
http://www.verso.com/

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--El Lissitzky, 1923

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 1997 20:13:48 UTC