The pica is a

typographic unit Typographic units are the units of measurement used in typography or typesetting. Traditional typometry units are different from familiar metric units because they were established in the early days of printing. Though most printing is digital ...

of measure corresponding to approximately of an

inch Measuring tape with inches The inch (symbol: in or ″) is a unit of length in the British imperial and the United States customary systems of measurement. It is equal to yard or of a foot. Derived from the Roman uncia ("twelfth ...

, or from to of a

foot The foot ( : feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg mad ...

. 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, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...

) generally is: 12 × 0.376 = . * The American pica of . It was established by the United States Type Founders' Association in 1886. In TeX one pica is of an inch. * The contemporary computer PostScript pica is exactly of an inch or of a

, i.e. 4.2 mm or 0.1 in. Publishing applications such as

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, b ...

and QuarkXPress 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 Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone tec ...

(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 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...

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) 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.

References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pica (Typography) Typography Units of length Customary units of measurement in the United States

See also

References