Fonts incorrect size from size desired

[Mike Lassiter]

I sort of stumbled upon this a couple of days ago and had to sort of work around it to get the text sized as intended. My understanding is text normally sized by "points" with 72 points equaling one inch in height. My son-in-law as me to create him a vinyl sign for his truck back window "IN GOD WE TRUST" and wanted the letters to be 2 inches tall. Seemed simple enough to do - just type it out and set the font size to 144 points. I did this in Graphtec Studio and ran into the size problem so I tried in Corel Draw X7 using the same font (and some different ones too just for comparison) and the text was the same 144 points tall, but only 1.386" tall in both programs. To get 2 inch tall letters I had to increase the font size in Corel Draw to 207.792 points. The attached screen snapshot should explain what I mean.

Font size example.jpg

Can someone explain why the text size is wrong? If 72 points is 1 inch tall 144 should be 2 inches tall. Yet to get 2 inches requires 207.792 point size text. What am I missing here?

[Gary Hair]

Point size and inch size do not correlate even though it seems they do, and they don't remain the same through the various fonts. Then throw in ascenders and descenders and you will really be confused . If I need text a specific height then I will type in the text and then use the X Y size boxes to make it as I need it to be - guaranteed to work.

[Jeff Belany]

Gary is correct. Point size type goes back a along way. 72/inch is just an estimate. If you need 2" letters, draw a 2" tall box in Corel. Set the type then enlarge by pulling a corner until the type fits the box. Takes seconds this way.

Jeff in northern Wisconsin

[Mike Lassiter]

Point size and inch size do not correlate even though it seems they do, and they don't remain the same through the various fonts. Then throw in ascenders and descenders and you will really be confused . If I need text a specific height then I will type in the text and then use the X Y size boxes to make it as I need it to be - guaranteed to work.

I understand about the ascenders and descenders. It messes things up often doing embroidery when you have a "y" for example. Everything here was all caps and straight lines across the top and bottom. Graphtec Studio sizes text by points sort of like Corel Draw. I could get 2 inch height in it sort of the same way as in Corel Draw - by selecting the object and scaling it manually. Ok then - guess I made it more complicated than it has to be.

[Mike Null]

The 72 points equal an inch goes back to the newspaper days and lead type. Gary has it right. One more thing, computer fonts have spacing built in to them. To view a real height and particularly, width dimension convert them to curves.

[Gary Hair]

You can make a cheat sheet of the fonts you use often - what pt size corresponds to what inch size. Or do like Jeff said and draw a box.

[Kev Williams]

Arial is almost dead on point to inches; a 100 point "A" is .994". Times Roman "A" = .941...

you want to really get confused, change your default text units to "inches" and see what happens-
Enter 1" and your Arial "A" will be all of .716", a Times Roman "A" will be .677", that's ridiculous!

---Like Gary sez, if you need a certain size letter (and some customers are very picky), correlate the point size with actual size-- The "IN GOD WE TRUST" sample above, to get 2" actual, the point size is 212.65...

AND like Mike sez, the built in kerning means most fonts will be positioned too far to the right when centering within a box or other graphic. It's easy to see this if you center some text in a box, then narrow the box.
For picky customers, this could be the difference between in and out of tolerance.

[Mayo Pardo]

Another thing you will notice as you play with fonts is that in most programs like Coreldraw, when you increase the height through the SIZE command, or if you drag it to a new size to fit within a box, it will assume that you want the size no larger than the numerical size entered or the box that was drawn.
So what happens is the rounded letters (GO, and S in your example above) will be the only letters that become 2 inches.
The letters with flat tops and bottoms stay in proportion and only resize to 1.942 for the word IN and 1.955 for the word WE, etc. This is because fonts are normally designed so that the letters which have open centers or rounded tops and bottoms will have a visually (not mathematically) uniform appearance when placed next to straight letters.

If you were to break apart all the letters and resize every letter exactly 2 inches tall it wouldn't look as pleasing as having the rounded letters slightly larger. This becomes more of a visual problem as the letters get larger.

So you decide, do you want the flat letters an actual 2 inches or do you want the rounded letters an actual 2 inches? With Times New Roman you can't have both without distorting the look.

Check out the height discrepancies when you enter numbers along with text!
Some are way way different than the height of the letters. It's real extreme in some fonts and barely noticeable in others.

One of the few fonts that does have a uniform height for all the letters is called MACHINE.
All the characters in that font have flat tops and bottoms.