Design size

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Under design size is understood in the typography that font size , was designed for a font. A scalable font looks best at design size.

History

In the age of metal typesetting , it was necessary to create a separate font style for each font size . These cuts had subtle differences, smaller sizes run proportionally further and have greater thicknesses , larger sizes run narrower and have proportionally smaller thicknesses.

When transferring the fonts in scalable formats (such as PostScript or TrueType ), a cut was picked out for digitization and then only scaled linearly. This procedure leads to a significant loss of the sentence quality .

The Computer Modern fonts from Knuth therefore come in a whole range of design sizes: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 point as well as 17 point. The thickness of the lines with which the letters are drawn remains almost the same, while with scaled fonts they get thicker the more the size is increased.

Today (2005) a few multiple master fonts have a font size axis that simulates the effect of different design sizes.