body

In letterpress printing, the body is the vertical metal block or shank on which a character is cast or mounted. The character itself, called the face, sits on top of this shank. The body extends downward from the face and must be precisely the same height across all characters in a font so they print on an even baseline. Traditional body height in Anglo-American printing is 0.918 inches (about 23.3 mm), a standard called type high.

Body size is measured in points, where 1 point equals 1/72 inch. A 12-point character has a body that is 12 points tall (roughly 4.2 mm); a 48-point character has a body roughly 16.9 mm tall. The measurement runs from the bottom of descenders (on letters like g, y, p) to the top of ascenders (on letters like h, l, k), plus some blank space called leading between lines. The body size itself does not determine the actual size of the printed letter, since the face can be smaller or larger relative to its shank.

Different body widths accommodate different characters. The body of an m is wider than the body of an i, so each character has its own body width suited to its natural proportion. This is called set width. A compositor selects pieces of type by body size and font, then arranges them in a composing stick to form lines and paragraphs. Mixing bodies of different heights in the same line produces uneven printing and is a common production fault.

The term body also refers to the depth measurement itself, independent of the piece. When a printer says a font is cast on a 12-point body, they mean the shank is 12 points from bottom to top. This is how type sizes were historically specified and ordered, since the body size determined how much space a character occupied vertically on the page, regardless of the actual visual size of the letter form.