Some Basic Facts About Fonts
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Appendix
Pitch (cpi) Pitch refers to the number of characters that are printed in one inch. The unit is cpi
(characters per inch). As the number of characters per inch increases, the space
between characters decreases; as the cpi decreases, the space between
characters increases.
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Pitch
Character Width (Fix and PS) Each character has a different width from all the other characters in a font at a given
point size. For example, “W” is a wider letter than “I.” There are two ways to go
about printing letters of different widths: you can print all letters with the same
spacing, regardless of their actual width; or you can change the spacing between
letters to accommodate these different widths. Printing all letters with the same
spacing is called “Fixed spacing”, while changing the spacing to accommodate
different letter widths is called “Proportional spacing.”
Because the Fixed spacing method prints all letters with the same spacing, the
number of characters which will fit into a given length is a fixed quantity which can
be specified.
If the characters are printed with Proportional spacing, then the number of
characters that will fit into an inch varies depending on the letters printed.
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