Height / Perimeter

[Dropout]

Good morning.

A bit of an odd question, but is there anywhere to find the height/perimeter ratio for different fonts? A customer wants a price on cnc cut letters per vertical inch and I'd like to better understand the relationship between the two measurements.

Thanks for any and all comments.

 

[Fred Weiss]

The only ratio I have ever used or seen used is the average height to width ratio of a font. It was widely used by wholesale letter services such as those offered by my company and Gregory Inc. in the 1980's and 1990's before in-house production became widespread. It allowed customers to calculate the approximate width of a line of copy.

It was arrived at by typing out the complete alphabet including the spacing between letters and dividing it by the number of characters. A second, more sophisticated, approach was to type out the characters using a frequency of use formula to arrive at a more accurate result.

So, for example, the height to width ratio for the font Helvetica Medium is .9 for caps and .7 for lower case and numbers. With that information you can count the characters and multiply it by the height and then by the width ratio of the font.

Examples:

DROPOUT = 7 characters
What will be the width of the word at a setting of 3" of height?
7 x 3 x .9 = 18.9 inches

Dropout = 1 cap and 6 LC
1 x 3 x .9 = 2.7"
6 x 3 x .7 = 12.6"
2.7 + 12.6 = 15.3 inches

Hope that helps.

 

[J Hill Designs]

the only way I know is (in omega) select your letter and click shape -> distance around objects...you can maybe set up a table for a few different fonts (serif vs sans etc) at different letter heights