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Report Builder
User’s Guide


Font Characteristics

When you apply fonts to fields in a report, you select fonts by font name (such as Times New Roman or Helvetica) and point size. The spacing, pitch, and point size of the fonts you select can affect the placement and alignment of fields in your report output.

Spacing and Pitch

Fonts that have characters of equal widths are called monospaced (or fixed-pitch) fonts. The character spacing of a monospaced font is expressed as pitch, the number of characters per horizontal inch. You can calculate the pitch of a monospaced font by dividing 120 by the point size. For example, the pitch of 12-point Courier is 10 (120/12 points = 10 pitch), or 10 characters per inch.

Fonts that have characters of different widths are called proportional fonts. Since a proportional font does not have a fixed number of characters per inch, it does not have an absolute pitch.

Point Size

A font’s point size refers to its height measured in printers’ points (1 point = 1/72 inch) which is the standard unit of measurement used by professional printers. For example, the body text of this manual is printed in a 10-point font; that is, the distance from the top of the highest character to the bottom of the lowest character is 10-points (10/72 inch). Some fonts (called bitmapped fonts) are available only in predetermined point sizes. Other fonts (often called scalable or outline fonts) are available in almost any point size.


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