Talk:Point (typography)

message: I find the history of the development of the point relevant. But right now the article does not "stick together". There is a reference to someone named Truchet, that appears to have been mentioned earlier but now he is nowhere to be found. Instead there is a Methusalem of a typographer named Neubauer. Perhaps someone can ask him because he seems to be alive for the next 67 years. 
The article probably should be more chronological (it is anything but chronological), with alle the old definitions in a History-section and the current point sizes in another. I believe that there in fact are four current definitions of the typographical point. Two European-continental and two English-American. A few more has existed. 
Maybe, just maybe, it should also mention the common names for various point-sizes used by non-English speaking. That is German and so on. They differ. In Danish e.g. we use (little) Sabon for 72 points. After all many tend to use the English Wikipedia as some sort of reference. 
This article needs a complete work-through. 
Ditlev Petersen (talk) 22:09, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Somewhat confusing 

message: The usual description of the point was that the US and British inches were slightly different, one a bit larger than 25.4 mm/inch and one a bit smaller. This mattered because on a single page of newsprint there could be over a thousand points. In the nineteenth century, the standard was based on the centimetre, but not by a direct ratio, for both the US and Britain to have it be readily available to both domains. 
In 1959, the International inch was settled upon, as that which the Australians had already chosen, and which had been suggested by many industries. The notes from French usage are appreciated, but no Commonwealth country, nor the US, calls it the "Anglo-Saxon" inch. 
In the 1970's or so, the Germans wanted a metric basis, so their DIN chose 375 micrometres for their point. I wonder whether it caught on. 
The main difference between the British/US and the Continental points is that other languages need extra room on top for all the diacritical marks on capital letters, e.g., É, Ö, Å... - so the point was a bit bigger for the Continental printers. Sobolewski 19:29, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Anglo-Saxon?

message: I find 15 625 / 83 118 difficult to read. Commas would make clearer that this is the quotient of two five-digit numbers. (Commas without spaces as in 15,625 / 83,118 are unambiguous.)   Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:45, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Vulgar fractions are perfectly fine with metric units, though somewhat uncommon. In this case, i.e. defining non-metric measures, they are the best choice, because the definitions result in these exact numbers, whereas a number with decimal fraction would have to be rounded (or repeated parts would have to be indicated). — Christoph Päper 15:57, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fraction

message: We had already had the following entry: Typographic unit.
Why was this added?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Taro Yamamoto (talk • contribs) 01:57, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Because no one calls them typographic units. It should be merged here. — LlywelynII 15:47, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Isn't this entry redundant? 

message: Interestingly, 72/√8 = 72/(2*√2) or ca. 280/11 is quite close to 25.4, which is the ratio between inch and millimetre. So if one used a typographer's foot of about 305.47013 mm (ca. 456/455 ft) with 72 points to it or if one used a point of about 1/71.84205 in (ca. 19/1365 in) one had a metric relationship that fit nicely with the ratio between ISO paper sizes, the following series: 1 pt, 0.5 mm, 2 pt, 1 mm, ... With reasonable rounding this is of course also usable for 1 pt = 1/72 in. 134.130.1.181 (talk) 11:42, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  72/√8 ~= [in]/[mm] 

message: Someone should ad a section for etymology  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.7.231.254 (talk) 00:08, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. You could be the person to add that section.--Aspro (talk) 21:14, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is origin of word or etymology? 

message: I was just looking at a 1908 Berthold specimen which specifies 2660 points to 1 meter, which is not what the article says. It agrees instead with the Tschichold reference.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.141.16.75 (talk) 17:42, 15 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Berthold Point Size Source

message: The section on Neubauer is dubious ... I can't find any references anywhere else, and the dates he lived are rather amusing. Jay Neubauer also doesn't sound much like the name of a French farmer from the 1600s. Nor does it explain why a farmer invented a point system.
Myroundcar (talk) 20:45, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Neubauer 

message: The part of the article dealing with the American point system explains the adoption of the Johnson pica. And the value of 303.5808 mm for the traditional printer foot corresponds exactly indeed to 249/250 times 304.8 mm, with 304.8mm = 12 x 2.54cm = 12 in (1959 value). This makes the printer point exactly 0.3513666666... mm, but then the paragraph concludes with the 72.27pt to an inch approximation, which is Hawks' point, and the value  0.3515 mm, whereas if there are 72 times 12 pts in a printer foot, we should have here 0.35136 mm. 
With the Johnson Pica, one computes that 1 inch contains 72+24/83=72.28915662.. printer points,  because 12inches is 250/249 of a printer foot, hence 1inch contains 250/249 times 72 printer points. I came to the page hoping to understand the status of the 72.27 thing, and I am now utterly confused. 
Gottfried59 (talk) 14:08, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion about American point system 

message: There's something odd about the claimed standardisation in the "late 1980s and early 1990s".  When I was involved with the our school press between 1969-1974 we were categorically told that a point was 1/72".  We set from cases onto compositing sticks and printed on ancient treadle powered jobbing presses, no H&S then!  Unfortunately I don't have any documentary evidence, not even the sheet we were given to learn the case layout from. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 18:16, 5 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: What's odd is that you had a teacher that told you something that was simply untrue. Basically, he was rounding off the point. Obviously it was simpler this way... probably the same thinking that encouraged Warnock & Geschke to do the same thing for PostScript. But that doesn't mean it was true at the time.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tphinney (talk • contribs) 12:46, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Standardisation dates 

message: Ok. Finally found a thorough source. Will remove the alt names to Wiktionary and just leave the major present names. — LlywelynII 10:00, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Table

message: ;Text
The bolded text are the names of the various obsolete points which receive redirects here. The values of those points are entirely obsolete and don't deserve any bolding whatsoever.
;Table
Now that there's more material, I bolded some of them to highlight the major English names, as opposed to the nearly unused ones such as American. Current criteria is OED entries or appearing in the EB, but probably better if there were an authoritative typographic guide that simply said "these are the major type body names prior to the pt system". — LlywelynII 15:39, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Bolded names

message: Removed 
:The original types only used the middle values: great primer remained the largest type size in Britain as late as 1840.
which was presumably sourced to the offline Typographic Desk Reference and CJKV Information Processing as it's patently untrue. The OED includes citations including things like
:1629, Charles Butler, Oratoriæ:
::Genera literarum... corporum proceritate distinguuntur: Primier, Pique, English: & supra hæc, Great Primier, Double Pique, Double English.
and
:1683, Joseph Moxon, Mechick Exercises; or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. Applied to the Art of Printing, Vol. II., p. 13:
::Most Printing-Houses have... Pearl, Nomparel, Brevier, Long-Primmer, Pica, English, Great-Primmer, Double-Pica, Two Lin'd English.
so sizes at least that large were already in use. — LlywelynII 21:54, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed

message: Mixed usage before, but per  an article on an American unit should employ American English. — LlywelynII 10:00, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Engvar

message: Typographic unit should be merged here. They cover the exact same  and this is the  name for the topic. — LlywelynII 15:50, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: While I see your point I have to disagree in the entirety of the  Typographic unit nos no detail for any of the units and unless you are planning on merging ALL the units onto one page I think we should leave it as is. DamaniRD (talk) 22:47, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

text: I also disagree. We do not merge the article "Length" with "Yard" and "Meter". Point is a particular measure while there exist others like pica or mm. On the contrary I propose to move the section "Point-size names" into an independent article (the name is already occupied by the redirect, we can just copy the text there).--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 12:06, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

text: I disagree for the reasons stated by User:LlywelynII and Lüboslóv Yęzýkin.—Finell 03:37, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I deleted the merge proposal for lack of support.—Finell 03:28, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge

message: ::I made a scan of two antique measuring rules in my property:
::: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Typesystems_pica_fournier_didot.jpg
::Here we can compare the three systems in full, could this end the arguing about the size of the foot on which Fournier based his system ?
::J.T.W.A.Cornelisse (talk) 08:27, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: scan made of antique measuring rules

message: I don't really like what  has done. I think a simple chronological order was better. Alright, it is true that Hawks came up with the idea that 6 picas made up one (American) inch, and that a pica could be further divided into 12 points (frankly, this idea does not look revolutionary to me, and likely he knew about Fournier and/or Didot). However, the rest of the story goes that the TFA accepted a pica, 6 of which make up 0.996 inch. On the other hand, what is called "DTP" is exactly what Hawks really wanted initially. Truchet, Fournier, Didot are all French. And the 0.25 mm point is left "unassigned".--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 14:03, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not totally happy with the table either. It used to be sorted by size. No matter whether ascending or descending, I think this makes more sense than chronological order since some dates are dubious. Also, related points automatically group then and we don't have to fight over appropriate collective terms. In other words, I don't care all that much about the newly introduced first column. — Christoph Päper 08:35, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  The dates are not that dubious. Yes, some may vary by a year or so, but this does not change the whole picture. As long as the article goes more or less in chronological order, it's better to treat the table the same way. Otherwise, we would have to list Q after Truchet, while they are absolutely unrelated and are about 300 years apart. Then the Japanese point would go before the American one, while it is obvious the Japanese got that from Americans. Etc. I think in fact we have only two groups: based on the French inch, and based on the American inch. A few are outsiders. But I have an idea how to fix it.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 16:41, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  The French 0.4-mm point, 1/4-mm Q and 3/8-mm "new" Didot point would then not really belong within the same group of Truchet, Fournier and Didot points. My criticism of the dates related mostly to the latter two of those, because 0.250 mm and 0.375 mm have been defined and used before the late 1990s. — Christoph Päper 13:22, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table grouping 

message: Leaving this comment here for later. Firstly, the "nd" (New Didot) unit mentioned in the article is probably not in TeX itself, but only in extensions like pdfTeX, XeTeX, etc. (There used to be a reference to the source code which would have helped research this further, but someone's removed this for some reason.) Secondly, about the printer's point: Knuth's (published) log has some relevant comments on how these values were chosen (see entries for 30 Oct 1982, 1 Nov 1982, and 4 Nov 1982). The "NBS Circular 570" they refer to is probably this. The actual code is in section 458 (and indirectly 617) of the TeX program, and refers to "Bosshard in Technische Grundlagen zur Satzherstellung (Bern, 1980)". There are some (mixed quality) comments here and here. (Just leaving this comment here to dump this info, so that someone (or I) could improve this article later, making sense of all this info.) Shreevatsa (talk) 01:14, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  The TeX definition(s) 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :Garamond (typography). The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 September 27#Garamond (typography) until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Blythwood (talk) 04:11, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Garamond (typography)" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]