Design grids

To design a character you use a grid that is 24 dots high—one dot for each pin on the printer’s print head. The width of the character matrix depends on the character set in use. For draft characters, the grid is nine dots wide, for Letter Quality it is 29 dots wide, and for proportional characters it is 37 dots wide. The dots for both Letter Quality and proportional characters are spaced more closely together than those for draft characters.

The illustrations below show the two design grids. The line at the side, labeled cap height, indicates the top of a standard capital letter. The line labeled baseline indicates the baseline for all letters except those with descenders (the bottom parts of such letters as j and y). The bottom row is usually left blank because it is needed for underlining.

Draft pica

Letter quality / Proportional

 

The grid on the right side can be used for either Letter Quality or proportional characters. For Letter Quality you do not use all the columns.

4-18 Software and Graphics