80. For the modern reader this is all rather confusing.

In the eighteenth century, and later, type was described by a name that indicated both the face design and the body size which was, in principle, fixed for type of that name. When line spacing was to be varied this could be done by casting the named face, for example Cicero, from its usual matrices but changing the body size by adjusting the hand-mould to a larger body size such as that normally used for a larger type such as St Augustin. The way in which this was done was described earlier in the article. Hence ‘Cicero on St Augustin body’ .

We now name faces according to the design of the letters on the type and not the size of the type. Sizing, is of course expressed by the body size measured in points and, when using hand-set metal type, white space between lines was increased by adding shims – leading – between the lines of type as it was being set.

This has all changed with the advent of digital type in which glyphs – vector representations of the shape of the letter, that is, effectively a set of instructions for constructing the shape from a series of lines, are used. These are almost infinitely scalable, so 10, 12, 14 etc. point sizes are generated by multiplying the vectors of the glyph by variable factors and the leading is adjusted by altering the position of the digital images of the letters relative to the paper. So in computer typography one can generate an almost infinite number of founts from the glyph set of a single face . But it is still convenient to describe a block of type as, for example, Times New Roman 12 on 14 point meaning that the final effect is that of setting 12 point Times Roman metal type with a leading of 14 points.