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Revision as of 12:07, 6 May 2006
The pica, pronounced ] ], is a unit of measure in typography. It corresponds always to 1/72 of its respective foot and so to 1/6 inch. There are 12 points in the pica.
In the history of printing till now, mainly three different picas were used:
- The French pica of 12 Didot's points, also called cicéro is generally: 12 x 0.376 = 4.512 mm or about 0.177 638 inch.
- The traditional American printer's system uses a point of 0.013837 in (1/72.27 in). Thus a pica is 0.166044 in (4.2175 mm).
- The current computer pica is defined as 1/72 of the Anglo-Saxon compromise foot of 1959, i.e. 4.233 mm or 0.166 inch. This pica was notably promoted by Adobe PostScript and nowadays dominates in the printing industry, just like in home computing and its printers.
A measurement in picas is usually represented by placing a capital P with a top-right to left-down slash beginning in the upper right of the round portion of the "P" and ending at the lower left of the upright portion of the "P"; essentially drawing a "/" through a "P". Likewise, points are represented by placing the number of points before a small p, such as 5p for "5 points," 6P2p for "6 picas and 2 points," or 1P1 for "13 points" which is converted to a mixed fraction of 1 pica and 1 point.