The digi­tal ‘revo­lu­tion’, with all the prac­ti­cal bene­fits it brought, mel­ted down some pieces of typo­gra­phic culture and prac­tice that favo­red a stron­ger fee­ling of exper­tise. The punches, that had to be cut at the actual scale of the point-size desi­red for the future font, requi­red a lot of wor­king time, an expert’s eye and a highly trai­ned hand. Cut­ting at the actual size pro­vides the advan­tage of being quite sure (depen­ding on the punchcutter’s abi­lity) that the font is fit for the inten­ded pur­pose, i.e. text, title or even big­ger dis­play type. This type­face qua­lity has vani­shed through the various tech­ni­cal evo­lu­tions even­tually tur­ning into a ghost when pho­to­ty­pe­set­ting, and later digi­tal type­set­ting, were intro­du­ced. We were so ama­zed by the sim­pli­city with which one could freely resize a single let­ter dra­wing that we partly for­got that the ori­gi­nal scale has a great effect on the print qua­lity at a cho­sen size. There have been, and still are, some digi­tal type­faces built on this prin­ciple of defi­ned scale dra­wings — the so-called opti­cal sizes — but this kind of desi­gns, because they require more time and are more constrai­ning to use, have remain mar­gi­nal. To be true, in most cases, desi­gning opti­cal sizes would be too much work for too poor a bene­fit, and one can work without it often enough not to regret the rarity of such products.

At the time of lead type­set­ting, prin­ters had less font point-sizes to choose from, as the models they were foun­ded from had to be cut one by one, whe­reas a com­pu­ter allows  to choose from an theo­re­ti­cal infi­nity of sizes, up to impro­bable and deci­mal point values. Today, naming a point-size other­wise than by its nume­ric value would make lit­tle sense as this value has an infi­nite varia­bi­lity, but in the past, each usual size had its lit­tle name. I found a list of these names (in french) in the Traité de la Typo­gra­phie prin­ted by Henri Four­nier (a pupil of Fir­min Didot) in the 1820s. As this treaty is one of the rea­sons why I star­ted wor­king on a didone, and the lat­ter is the rea­son why I got inter­es­ted in opti­cal sizes, I have set this list anew with the men­tio­ned typeface.

This list brings up ques­tions as some of these equi­va­lences aren’t confir­med on all accounts, nota­bly the ‘Tris­mé­giste’ which stands for the 33 points size in this list although it is gene­rally refer­ring to the 36 points size. Ano­ther incon­sis­tency is visible on the ‘Cicero’ name that usually refers to 12 points, but stands for 11 in this list. I won­de­red if those were mis­takes but it is unli­kely as later edi­tions show the same figures. I’d rather be prone to think these dif­fe­rences rely on the various mea­su­ring sys­tems (Didot, Four­nier, etc.) which where deve­lo­ped few decades before this publi­ca­tion, thus I guess, the irre­gu­la­ri­ties. Any­way, to me this list can more sim­ply serve as a remin­der of the fact that our recent free­dom to set type at any size is not neces­sa­rily bene­fi­cial, and that wor­king on com­po­si­tions with fixed-sizes ratios* can some­times be of inter­est, would it be for the sole plea­sure of exercise.

*I men­tion ‘ratios’ because the various type mea­su­re­ment sys­tems express dis­tinct phy­si­cal sizes for the same nume­ric values.

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