Haultin mastered the scale of small types with large
x-height for readability, most suited to Bible printing.
Vertically the bar should be visually centered between the
x-height and the ascender.
Optical middle is obviously lower than 50% due to the
x-height and serifs.
The class was surprised to find that today's postscript fonts often include a set of true small caps (specially designed capital letters the same size or "
x-height" as the lower case characters of a font) as well as old-style numbers (numerals that go above and below the baseline).
They can also see all the font styles within a family, and they can search for versions by increasing or decreasing attributes like boldness, width, contrast, or
x-height. And if all else fails, the site will analyze a scanned sample of text and will display possible matches.
The first dimension is the height of the lowercase characters: the
x-height. This dimension determines how large a reader perceives characters to be.
Changes in various type features can create variations in typographic tonality; such type features include (Keyes, 1993; Mozina, 2001a): typeface (style of letter form--stroke width, set width, counter size,
x-height); caps, italic, bold, compressed and extended (and all variations in weight and width); type size; letter and word spacing; leading; line length.
We glean more details on the development of the gros oeil types of larger
x-height demanded by the efficiency experts in the Low Countries.
The heart of the book is about "Seeing the text: the role of typography and space" and then about "The interplay of words and pictures." Here you'll find information about letterforms: type families, type sizes, typefaces,
x-height, weight, etc.
A critical factor in determining how much white space there can be inside a lower-case letter is its
x-height - the height of the lower-case letters (a, c, e, m, n, o ...