![]() ![]() And that is the cause of the discrepancy in measurements between the TeX point and that used by Adobe products and software manufacturers that support the standard imposed by Adobe.Īs you can see in egreg’s answer, The TeXbook is an earlier piece than the domination of Adobe and its rounded pica which is called also the PostScript pica. Opposition to this practical idea must have been very small, let alone considering Adobe's influence is such that it has been the market leader ever since. It was then, when from Adobe came the idea of simplifying the point, rounding it to 1/72, whereby a smallest point was obtained but it was fully compatible with the English inch. Then came the war of the Desktop Publishing systems and everything else. They were also the days in which Adobe and PostScript emerged, and quickly spread throughout the world. The 80s were the times of typographical democratization. In the second half of the twentieth century appeared computers, which in the 80s began to become popular and to enter into virtually all human activity, including typography. In those years the traditional pica and pica point were not rounded. Knuth was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father owned a small printing business where Knuth, since childhood, was familiar with the technique of composition with types, which years later will abstract to create TeX. ![]() It is in this part of the story when Donald Ervin Knuth who is, as we all know here (I think), among many other things, the author of TeX, which in turn is the basis of LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc. Then the (western) world was divided into two for a long time measurement systems were not compatible. I honestly do not know to what that extra 0.27 is due, but in traditional English typographic practice that is the value that it has been for centuries. The Didot points were defined as the 1/144 part of the old French inch, meanwhile the pica point measures 1/72.27 of an inch. So far we have two types of points: pica points and Didot points. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the cicero had its counterpart, a unit of similar length called the pica, which in turn also divides into 12 parts called points. Notice that curiously it is France that began to normalize and look for a more orderly system of rational measurement, which gave rise to the metric system, SI base.Īnd so the Didot point, which was the unit of typographic measure most popular in Europe until the second half of the twentieth century, except in England and its colonies, was established. What Fournier did was take the smallest grade and he divided it into six parts, so the sixth part was the point and eleven points formed a cicero.Īlmost twenty years later, François-Ambroise Didot perfected the defining point system from a French measure of length called pied-du-Roi, where 12 points (12 was a common number for dividing things before the metric system) formed a cicero related now with the ancient French inch. At the end of the first half of this century, a French printer named Pierre Simon Fournier (the younger) tried to normalize that mess by creating a unit of typographic measure: the point. It was not until the eighteenth century when the matter began to be normalized. ![]() In the English one I don't know, but the idea should not differ much. This scale was arbitrary and used certain grades or reference magnitudes that were quite quaint and with curious names, at least in the Spanish typographic tradition. In the beginningįrom the early days of the emergence of the printing press, and the mythical Gutenberg and for a long time, each printer, each workshop had its own way of measuring the types used. And it has to do with the way we measure types. ![]() The history about the pica pint is quite interesting (at least for me). ![]()
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