Letters A & X

Typography Anatomy

Letter A

A.A.

Abbreviation for “author’s alteration,” used to flag amistake or correction by the author.

ABA form.

Design principle of form interrelationships,involving repetition and contrast.

Accents.

Small marks over, under, or through a letterform, indicating specific punctuation or changes in stress.

Agate.

Vertical unit used to measure space in newspapercolumns, originally five-and-one-half point type. Fourteen agatelines equal approximately one inch.

Alert box.

A message box that appears on a computer screenwith information for the user, for example, a “bomb message”when a computer crashes.

Alignment.

Precise arrangement of letterforms upon an imaginary horizontal or vertical line.

Alphabet length.

Horizontal measure of the lowercasealphabet in a type font, used to approximate the horizontalmeasure of type set in that font.

Ampersand.

Typographic character (&) representing the word

Anti-aliasing.

The blurring of a jagged line or edge on a screen or output device to give the appearance of a smooth line. Application program. Computer software used to create and modify documents.

Area composition.

The organization of typographic and other graphic elements into their final positions by electronic means (keyboard, graphics tablets, and electronic pens, etc.), eliminating the need for hand assembly or pasteup.

Ascender.

Stroke on a lowercase letter that rises above the mean-line.

ASCII code.

Abbreviation for American Standard Code of Information Interchange. The numbers 0 through 127 represent the alphanumeric characters and functions on the keyboard.

Aspect ratio.

The ratio of an image, screen, or other medium’s height to its width. Images will become distorted if forced into a different aspect ratio during enlargement, reduction, or transfers.

Autoflow.

A page-layout program setting for placing blocks of text from page to page without operator intervention.

Autopaging, Automatic pagination.

A capability in computer typesetting for dividing text into pages. Advanced autopaging can add page numbers and running heads, and avoid awkward widows and orphans.

Auto-runaround, Automatic runaround.

A page-layout program feature that flows text smoothly around graphics or headlines placed within the normal text area.

 Letter X

x-height.

The height of lowercase letters in a font, excluding characters with ascenders and descenders. This is most easilymeasured on the lowercase x.