The pica is a
typographic unit of measure corresponding to approximately of an
inch
The inch (symbol: in or prime (symbol), ) is a Units of measurement, unit of length in the imperial units, British Imperial and the United States customary units, United States customary System of measurement, systems of measurement. It is eq ...
. One pica is further divided into 12
points.
In printing, three pica measures are used:
* The French pica of 12
Didot points (also called
cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...
) generally is: 12 × 0.376 = .
* The American pica of . It was established by the United States Type Founders' Association in 1886. In
TeX
Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
one pica is of an inch.
* The contemporary computer PostScript pica is exactly of an inch, i.e. 0.1 in or 4.2 mm.
Publishing applications such as
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application software, application produced by Adobe Inc., Adobe and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, ...
and
QuarkXPress
QuarkXPress is desktop publishing software for creating and editing complex page layouts in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. It runs on macOS and Windows. It was first released by Quark, Inc. in 1987 and is still owned and p ...
represent pica measurements with whole-number picas left of a lower-case ''p'', followed by the points number, for example: 5p6 represents 5 picas and 6 points, or 5 picas.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) defined by the
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
use pc as the abbreviation for pica ( of an inch), and pt for point ( of an inch).
The pica is also used in measuring the font capacity and is applied in the process of copyfitting. The font length is measured there by the number of ''characters per pica'' (cpp). As books are most often printed with proportional fonts, cpp of a given font is usually a fractional number. For example, an 11-point font (like
Helvetica
Helvetica, also known by its original name Neue Haas Grotesk, is a widely-used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the f ...
) may have 2.4 cpp,
thus a 5-inch (30-pica) line of a usual octavo-sized (6×8 in) book page would contain around 72 characters (including spaces).
There have existed copyfitting tables for a number of typefaces, and typefoundries often provided the number of characters per pica for each type in their specimen catalogs. Similar tables exist as well with which one can estimate the number of characters per pica knowing the lower-case alphabet length.
The typographic pica should not be confused with the
''Pica'' font of the typewriters, which means a font where 10 typed characters make up a line one inch long.
See also
*
Point (typography)
In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout printing's history. Since the 18th century, the size of a point ...
*
Pitch (typewriter)
Pitch is the number of ( monospaced) letters, numbers and spaces in of , that is, ''characters per inch'' (abbreviated cpi), measured horizontally. The pitch was most often used as a measurement of the size of typewriter fonts as well as those of ...
*
Traditional point-size names
Fonts originally consisted of a set of moveable type letterpunches purchased from a type foundry. As early as 1600, the sizes of these types—their "bodies"—acquired traditional names in English, French, German, and Dutch, usually from their ...
References
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pica (Typography)
Typography
Units of length
Customary units of measurement in the United States