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Typographical units

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description: The use in typography of the point, which was one twelfth of a ligne in the customary French measures of the Ancien Régime, as a unit for measuring print type predates the metric system. Various typo ...

The use in typography of the point, which was one twelfth of a ligne in the customary French measures of the Ancien Régime, as a unit for measuring print type predates the metric system. Various typographic points were defined, including the Truchet point by Sébastien Truchet (1657–1729),[2] the Fournier point by Pierre Simon Fournier in 1737[3] and the Didot point by the Didot brothers, Francois Ambroise and Pierre Francois, in 1755[citation needed] or 1767[citation needed] or 1783,[4] which was exactly two Truchet points. The point was first used in the United States in 1878[citation needed] or 1872[4] by a Chicago type foundry (Marder, Luse, & Co.).
The point was defined as 1/12 of a pica consisting of 1/6 of an inch truncated to thousandths of an inch (1/12 of 0.166 inches) in the USA in 1886 and was quickly adopted by Britain and its colonies;.[4] This number has been approximated in various ways depending on the technology, prejudices, and information available to engineers involved in the production of typesetting machinery since then. Common approximations in use are 1/72.27 inch (now equal to 0.3514598 mm) and simply 1/72 of an inch. Other typographic points are used in other countries.
The pica in any of several related systems measures 12 points.

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