Each type style comes in a range of sizes. Type sizing has a strange language of its own, unrelated to any other system of measure­ment-a legacy of seventeenth-century type founder Pierre Simon Fournier. His measuring divided our inch into 72 parts called “points” for vertical notation. Width is measured in “picas,” six to an inch.

But type measurement is mechanical; each letter takes its own amount of space on the page, and type counting, or “casting”, becomes a simple addition problem in points and picas. The generally accepted sizes of type to be read at normal book-reading distance are 8-point, and 10-point. Dividing them into the 72-point inch will fit nine lines, eight lines, and about seven lines respectively, in each of column height.

The most easily read column width for these type sizes is about 2¼ inches. Newspapers use columns slightly under 2 inches an 11-pica column. But most magazines and a majority of company publica­tions use. a 13½ pica column. More of the smaller 8-point letters will fit in a column line than will 10-point letters. Each type style and size has its “average-character-per-line” measurement listed on charts available from any trade typographer. As an example, 10-point Garmond shows an “average character per line” count of 38 letters of between-word spaces, per 13$ pica column line. If you have written a paragraph of 262 characters, divide by 38 and you will see that it will take seven lines, or 1 inch of column depth.

An easier way to copy fit to the format is to set your typewriter to an approximate 38 character line and write your copy. Then the typing will match the typographic column line for line and you will know how many column inches you are producing. Photo captions for pictures two column wide can be typed the same way once you have decided on a type size for the format.

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Photos:

Commercial photos generally come printed on 8 by 10 inch paper. The plate maker’s camera can reduce the picture to column width. To find how much column depth the photo will take, place a paper over it and run a line from upper left corner to lower right, drawing the line with a light touch that will not score the photo’s surface. This diagonal line becomes a proportion chart. A horizontal line of the column width measurement placed from the left of the picture to the proportion line will show the point of the upper right corner of the final printing size. The measure from this point to the bottom of the photo will give the column height of the picture.

Photo-cropping:

Photo-cropping can be an art in itself. Television has taught the public eye to accept large images with extraneous detail cut off the edges. Photos can be cropped to focus on the story the picture tells. Thoughtful cutting can be a form of editing that increases the drama of the picture story. If you do so select a portion of a picture within a photo, draw the “crop lines” on the paper overlay, and proportion the section as you would the whole photo.