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/ˈmɛʒ.ər/

Measure

noun · typography

The length of a line of text — the width of the column it fills — conventionally counted in characters or set in points and picas.

What it is

Measure is the typographic name for line length, and it is the single variable that most affects reading comfort in continuous text. Too short, and the eye must return to the left margin so often that rhythm breaks and hyphenation runs rampant; too long, and the eye loses its place on the return sweep and rereads or skips lines. The widely cited target is roughly 45 to 75 characters per line for single-column text, with about 66 characters — counting letters and spaces — taken as the comfortable ideal.

Measure is set by the column, so it is inseparable from grid decisions: column count, gutter width, and margins together fix how wide each line can be. Note that this is the typographic sense of "measure" — line length — and not the drawing-studio sense of sight measurement, which is an unrelated proportion-checking technique.

A block of text lines with a dimension arrow marking the measure, the line lengthmeasure (line length)
The measure is the horizontal length of the text line.

Etymology

The term comes from the letterpress compositor's measure — the width to which the composing stick was set before lines of metal type were assembled in it, expressed in picas. The usage is centuries old and survives intact in digital typography. Robert Bringhurst devotes a section of The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) to choosing a measure, and it is from his discussion that the "45–75 characters, 66 ideal" guideline is most often quoted.

Examples in use

"Drop the body to a 24-pica measure — the lines are running too long to track comfortably." A web designer caps the measure with a max-width in ch units (e.g. 65ch) so paragraphs never exceed a readable line length on wide screens. Multi-column layouts shorten the measure deliberately so dense reference text stays scannable.

See also: Gutter · Margin · Baseline · Typographic grid · Baseline grid overlay

References

  1. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style, 3rd ed. Hartley & Marks (2004). ISBN 978-0-88179-206-5.
  2. Lupton, Ellen. Thinking with Type, 2nd ed. Princeton Architectural Press (2010). ISBN 978-1-56898-969-3.
  3. Dowding, Geoffrey. Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type. Hartley & Marks (1995). ISBN 0-88179-119-9.

Sarah Chen

Founder of Grid Maker Pro. Classical portrait painter (BA Fine Arts). Writes about composition, drawing methods, and the art-history claims that don't survive measurement.

Updated · Methodology