CompuServe Messages

I think Scott was looking for a "characters per pica" average figure for each font/size. This is a common value in commercial typesetting, since it allows a reasonable estimate of column depth–or page count–to be made from a manuscript. It's based on an "average" mix of text, and I guess one could write a program to compute a value from an AFM file. A typesetter I have done work with produced a type book with samples of type in many sizes, and he had his Quadex front-end system compute a characters-per-pica value from the sample blocks. It would be handy to have Adobe compute such values and include them in the font catalog. Book and magazine publishers find these numbers very useful.