Pitch is the number of (monospaced) letters, numbers and spaces in one inch (25.4 mm) of running text, that is, characters per inch (cpi), measured horizontally.
Overview The pitch was most often used as a measurement of the size of typewriter fonts as well as those of impact printers used with computers. The most widespread fonts in typewriters are 10 and 12 pitch, called Pica and Elite, respectively. Both fonts have the same x-height, yielding six lines per vertical inch. There may be other font styles with various width: condensed or compressed (17–20 cpi), italic or bold (10 pitch), enlarged (5–8 cpi), and so on.
See also Courier (typeface) – Monospaced slab serif typeface Letter-spacing – Physical spacing of characters in textPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets Proportional spacing – A proportional typeface contains glyphs of varying widths, while a monospaced (non-proportional or fixed-width) typeface uses a single standard width for all glyphs in the font. Consequently, the pitch of a proportionally spaced font is undefined. Traditional point-size names – Names used in printing
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References
External links "100 typewriter typefaces compared". x over it. 19 March 2014.