typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), and ...

, the mean line is the imaginary line at the top of the

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...

. upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography Round

glyphs A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

will tend to break ( overshoot) the mean line slightly in many

typefaces A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

, since this is aesthetically more pleasing, otherwise curved letters such as ''a'', ''c'', ''e'', ''m'', ''n'', ''o'', ''r'', ''s'', and ''u'' will appear visually smaller than flat-topped (or bottomed) characters of equal height, due to an

optical illusion Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual perception, percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide v ...

References

External links

* Page 31
The Complete Manual of Typography: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type, Second Edition
by James Felici {{DEFAULTSORT:Mean line Typography