Glossary for Geospatial Science

point size: The vertical size of a text font is expressed in points.  There are 72 points in an inch, so a 12-point font would be 12/72, or 1/6 of an inch tall, while a 36-point font would be 36/72, or 1/2 inch tall.  Of course the heights of different letters vary (‘L’ is taller than ‘e’).  The point size refers to the distance between the highest ascender in a font’s character encoding scheme (the part above the line in a letter like ‘l’ or ‘b’), and the lowest descender in the set (the part below the line in a letter like ‘g’ or ‘y’).  (See also: bitmapped font, outline font)