New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
Weight
Hi there!
Could anybody provide an average stroke size (in FontLab's points) for each weight in this list:
Hairline
Thin
Ultra-light
Extra-light
Light
Book
Normal / regular / roman / plain
Medium
Demi-bold / semi-bold
Bold
Extra-bold / extra
Heavy
Black
Extra-black
Ultra-black / ultra
Cheers!
User login
Support our Sponsors
28 Nov 2011 — 2:40am
This is a difficult question to answer, the actual values would depend on the units per em you were using and also on the style of the typeface itself. Once you have a value to start from (establishing the normal weight makes most sense) there are numerous ways of distributing the weights.
This thread
http://typophile.com/node/83010
has a good discussion about the theory of it, and I'm sure there are lots of others.
7 Dec 2011 — 9:07am
AFAIK, nobody has yet made such calculations.
Why don't you do the work yourself?
8 Dec 2011 — 3:23pm
Nick, I don't have enough fonts for this.
I thought that many people here can provide some measurements for their font collections. And we will be able to get the average measurements.
8 Dec 2011 — 10:32pm
I once did it, out of curiosity. Measuring the stem of the lowercase i and averaging a large number of fonts, both sans and serif.
It resulted into this (translated to UPM 1000):
006 Hairline
023 Thin
040 Extra Light
057 Light
073 Book
093 Medium
117 Semibold
142 Bold
182 Black
227 Ultra
But don't take it to seriously. It's only and average and has no practical use.
8 Dec 2011 — 11:56pm
Probably not very useful but still interesting stuff, Pablo. Thanks for sharing.
I am curious: Did you notice any significant differences when comparing sans stems vs. serif stems? I am wondering if sans stems could be a bit lighter on average.
9 Dec 2011 — 10:26am
This question is futile, because absolute stem width is irrrelevant, due to:
- the arbitrary nature of glyph size relative to em square
- the different requirements of different type styles, in particular:
- the role of x-height, which also raises the issue of:
- difference in stem width between caps and lower case
Here are some common types, at the same nominal point size at left, and with x-heights equalized, at right.
The last two, Futura and Verdana, appear to have radically different stem widths at the same point size, but with x-heights equalized, very similar.
9 Dec 2011 — 12:09pm
Indeed. Just wondering for the fun of it.
9 Dec 2011 — 3:23pm
@Cristobal
> Did you notice any significant differences when comparing sans stems vs. serif stems?
> I am wondering if sans stems could be a bit lighter on average.
Don't remember. But my "guess" is that serif stems will be a bit lighter, since the serifs in itself are adding mass to the glyphs.
In my Quattrocento Sans and Serf fonts, the serif stem is 66 and the sans stem is 70.
10 Dec 2011 — 1:36pm
Frutiger Medium has a perfect 1:5 stroke width to height ratio, a do a lot of Medium weight designs. Not the worst thing in the world to emulate, but not necessary either.
10 Dec 2011 — 7:58pm
…a perfect 1:5 stroke width to height ratio…
A little larger in the digital font, 1:5.4, presumably to allow for ink gain.