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→The font designer decides on the ‘natural’ size of the font.
it should in fact be equivalent to “Times-Roman at ’natural size’”.
For most fonts, this ‘natural size’ is 10&thinnbspnbsp;pt, but special display
or footnote fonts may have a different intended use size, and the
font designer may have made special glyph adjustments for that
purpose. For example, the computer modern family has special fonts
with a ‘natural’ size anywhere between 5pt 5 pt and 17pt17 pt. The glyphs inthe specific fonts with a smaller ‘natural’ size (like 8pt8 pt)
are in fact a little bit bolder and wider than the same glyphs in
the font designed to be used at 10pt10 pt. This makes sense when youconsider that the 8pt 8 pt font is likely be used along with the 10ptfont for e.g. footnotes. The 10pt 10 pt font used at 8pt 8 pt size would lookthinner and weaker than the actual font designed for 8pt8 pt.
* Second, a design size in points like ‘10pt’ ‘10 pt’ is somewhat misleading,
because what it actually is, is just a different way of saying “at
the expected size for traditional main text”. The “10pt“10 pt" is not
necessarily a measure of _anything_ in the font. In fact, font designers
sometimes do not use a “XXpt” design size at all.The Minion font family
That leaves the question of what the actual size is of a font used
at “10pt”. As explained above, there are no hard rules. But usually
for a modern font the “10pt“10 pt" is the _vertical_ space needed to enclose
all of the ascenders and descenders in the font when all the glyphs
are overlaid on top of each other. Traditionally, this was also the
case, since some font families have condensed or extended members
(and it really only applied to ‘upright’ fonts anyways).
====== ''If two fonts have the same size, is a dimension which has the same length in both. Which one is this?'' ======
